I\'m an enthusiast with friends that can manufacture single pieces of CNC cut an

Question

I'm an enthusiast with friends that can manufacture single pieces of CNC cut and milled metal, and I cannot find a perfect computer case for my needs. My friends can't find ones for them, either, and it's time for hardware upgrade for quite few of us. So we decided to try and make what we need.

I have all pieces modelled: Motherboard with CPU and RAM, HDD, DVD drive, drive baskets, PSU and so on. Now, I need a software that would make it easy to rotate them 90 degrees in all axis, move them around and snap them to a 3d grid and to each other. And at the end export it to some universal format, so my engineer friend could import it to CAD and produce layouts for cutting machines and so on. Part of the task I'm asking pretty much ends on deciding how do I want them arranged, so ease of move, snap and 90 degree rotation is pretty much all I need. Oh, and I would rather not pay much for such a simple task. We are not going to earn on it, and if we succeed we probably will share designs under open licence, so free software would be desirable. If that's impossible, I may consider commercial software, but I'll be reluctant about anything over $100, unless we'll find that one of my friends has access to it on employer-issued laptop and is allowed by his bosses to use it for private modelling like this.

I tried FreeCAD, but while I found it great to model a piece I can measure (that's how I get some models mentioned above), I can't find a way to easily use it as a freehand "layout prototyping tool".

We all are using Windows, mostly, but have access to Linux stations too. You know the type of people, more computers than humans in a house? So while Windows is highly preferable, it's not a really "must have".

Explanation / Answer

You didn't say in what file-format you modelled your pieces or in which you need your CAD data.

You could try blender, its free and supports many different formats for import- and exporting. Its more a 3d modelling software but it should serve your purpose.

If it doesn't support your prevered format(s) you can activate even more importers/exporters under the user-preferences/addons (e.g. DXF).

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