Autodesk Fusion 360 is free for personal use. It is a CAD program like Autodesk Inventor(which can be free if you have a .edu student school email address). I was familiar with Inventor and found Fusion 360 pretty similar with nice parametric modeling.
- You can have multiple components in one design (and apply some assembly contraints)
- For the blueprint type view that you can annotate and add dimensions, it is called a "drawing"
- Changing units (metric to imperial, mm to in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHrVXu1okK4
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXVaGgvGfvM
Relevant issues
One workaround would be to setup an animation and then create a new drawing from that animation.
But you currently can't animate a joint in the "Animation" interface. The "Animation" interface seems to be all about the exploded view.
- Upvote the feature request: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-ideastation/allow-joints-to-constrain-animations/idi-p/6436903
- A crappy workaround mimicing the effect sorta for basic rotations but all manual work: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/getting-started/caas/screencast/Main/Details/39b2bd83-cc71-4bd7-b5cf-aa940e654d3e.html
- https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-to-animate-joints-in-Fusion-360.html
- https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-design-validate/joint-animation/m-p/6878268#M98317
You can animate joints with motion study back in the "Design" interface but it is also not suitable because you can't create a drawing from it. This is the workaround Autodesk recommeneds if you want to create a video render though. They say to setup a motion study then just do a screencast of your screen animating it :xd:
If I save multiple different copies of a model, I can't replace it in a drawing.
If you keep saving over the same file, there are revisions and you can update the drawing.