Designing 3D figures -- Aspire vs. Fusion 360

I use both blender and Zbrush for my pattern creation. Blender is free and Zbrush is $900 currently.

Blender is an all in one 3d package. You can model, digitally sculpt, digitally paint, animate, has several physics engines for simulations, and does video and sound editing. In other words its a very complex program. If you have not used 3d programs before it has a steep learning curve...but it is free. And you can ignore everything else and just learn the modeling and sculpting parts and call it good. That's what I did the first few years and I'm just now learning the other parts (slowly).

Zbrush is a digital sculpting program. It is amazing but it is also fairly complex. You can do limited animation and painting with it. You can build incredibly complex and large models with the program. It is the industry standard for digital sculpting in the 3d world.

If you can master either of these (or both) there will be nothing you can't model and create.

There are other 3d modeling software you can also use. Sculptris, 3d Coat, ..etc. based on your modeling needs, time and budget. If you are looking for more CAD like modeling then fusion 360 or Aspire are great routes to go with. Even traditional CAD programs are viable. (List of 3D modeling software - Wikipedia)

Personally, blender is my go to modeler with Zbrush for detailing and organic sculpting, though blender is getting better and better and competes really well with pretty much everything out there. Not necessarily the best at any one thing but good enough for pretty much everything.

P.S. There is a free add on in blender that lets you create base meshes (geometry) of people: MBLabs (https://mblab.dev/).

Fusion 360 works, but not very good for “artsy” type work (text, signs, 3D STLs, Vcarving) which are the most common types of work done on CNC routers. Fusion 360 works best for designs completely created in fusion, importing large DXF, SVG or STL files seems to really slow it down (often to the point of being unusable). You also have to model everything as a solid to toolpath it, where most of the programs can create 2d and 2.5d toolpaths based on 2d vectors. It also defaults to working and saving files online. Completely different workflow than VCarve Pro or Aspire, and a much more difficult learning curve. Carveco Maker+ can create 3D models, is $50/month or $1200 for a perpetual license, similar features to Aspire. Carveco Maker, is only $15/month, similar feature set to VCarve Pro, but can import multiple STL files into a single model without tricks that make files very difficult to edit (unlike the VCarve Pro workaround alluded to above). If you do choose to learn to do the modeling in something like Zbrush or blender, you will have much better experience importing to VCarve Pro or one of the Carveco products than Fusion 360 . It chokes on any STL file with more than 50K facets, and many files you can buy have far higher facet counts (millions are not uncommon). It is likely that files you create will exceed the 50K facets as well.