I would also like to mention FreeCad - an open source parametric 3d modeler.
Cubify Design, although not open source, is one of the cheaper 3d cad tools which also supports parametric modeling.
Cubify Design, although not open source, is one of the cheaper 3d cad tools which also supports parametric modeling.
It was very, very promising, right until the moment I started doing a real design in it. I hit so many bugs and problems, that I couldn't finish the work. Debugging constraints was pretty much impossible: if something went wrong (and it almost always did), I'd have to restart from scratch.
I can compare it to SolidWorks, which I also used, where debugging constraints is also a major pain point (why don't they make this easier?), but at least it's possible. And it is buggy, too, but much less so than Cubify, which means you can actually get things done.
From my point of view (external perspective of a software engineer), 3D modelling tools suck, in general. Few support parametric modelling, which consider a must-have, and those that do are pretty poor at it (discuss after you've created a parameter-driven assembly of multiple components in SolidWorks, and then decided to change a parameter name/value or move a parameter from a component to assembly-level).
I would welcome your thoughts on just how to best hack these exact types of parametric changes in SolidWorks, especially at the component to assembly-level transition. It does seem pretty hopeless, as you say.
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BTW, top-down building (e.g. starting from the assembly) has never worked for me. I always end up with an unmaintainable mess — but that could be my poor skills.
It doesn't support assemblies yet (although its on a branch!) so I just designed a linkage system extremely carefully and swiss cheesed some parts to avoid dealing with dimensions as much as i could. I used to use Inventor but Fusion 360 is nice - and its free for startups.
As soon as Freecad supports assemblies I will probably switch back. I hate booting into OSX for Cad work and back home to linux for coding.