I didn't know that there was a FreeCAD Day! But I'll take this opportunity to just give thanks to the FreeCAD developers for creating and sustaining an amazing program. We all know it's not perfect, but it's already incredibly powerful and I'm now using it professionally in place of SolidWorks. Not only do I save a ton of money, I feel way more in control of my work, and have ownership of my hard-earned skills. I can write my own Python routines to automate parametric modelling and use FreeCAD as a back-end for doing geometric calculations. It's fantastic and I'm grateful for it.
I do not want to sound negative towards something that is a gift but when I tried to use it in place of SW and it is so far behind from a practical point of view.
Have you used Catia before? I used to think Catia was the dumbest CAD package ever. After being forced to use it for about a year, I honestly get why they’re made that way now. And dare I say, Catia is actually a pretty good CAD package. (I’ve lived and breathed solidworks for about a decade, used and trained in Creo, Inventor, and now Catia). I think FreeCAD is modeled (pun intended) to be more like Catia hence why it feels so far behind.
No Catia. Here is my story. While I mostly do software at some point I needed to design some piece of equipment from scratch. At the time I happened to have access to Solidworks and without any prior experience in mechanical CAD I was able to do it in about a month. Parts, assembly, subassemblies, regular CNC parts, sheet metal, welds, fastening. Stellar. Despite absolutely insane power the tool is super easy to use for complete noob. I tried later on to do something like this in FreeCad - never fucking again.
Yes, SolidWorks is easy to pick up and use with no training. FreeCAD is not; it requires dedicated time to learn, following tutorials, and at least a few throw-away projects to gain proficiency. There are a lot of easy mistakes that can sabotage progress, and multiple ways of doing things that are different under the hood, where those differences aren't obvious, including some ways that are bad and wrong. But there's a lot it can do, and it gets better all the time.
My goal was to produce the design, not to master design tool. The less time I spent the better is my ROI. I have neither time nor desire to dedicate myself to be a master of particular tool.
>>> While I mostly do software at some point I needed to design some piece of equipment from scratch. At the time I happened to have access to Solidworks and without any prior experience in mechanical CAD I was able to do it in about a month. Parts, assembly, subassemblies, regular CNC parts, sheet metal, welds, fastening. Stellar. Despite absolutely insane power the tool is super easy to use for complete noob. I tried later on to do something like this in FreeCad - never fucking again.
>> Yes, SolidWorks is easy to pick up and use with no training. FreeCAD is not; it requires dedicated time to learn, following tutorials, and at least a few throw-away projects to gain proficiency. There are a lot of easy mistakes that can sabotage progress, and multiple ways of doing things that are different under the hood, where those differences aren't obvious, including some ways that are bad and wrong. But there's a lot it can do, and it gets better all the time.
> My goal was to produce the design, not to master design tool. The less time I spent the better is my ROI. I have neither time nor desire to dedicate myself to be a master of particular tool.
This is actually how a lot of the "Niche language $FOO is a superior language" arguments go.
It's also a counterpoint to "but it's doing a complicated job so the UI has to be complicated" nonsense defence that gets brought up in FreeCAD's defence a lot.
> It's also a counterpoint to "but it's doing a complicated job so the UI has to be complicated" nonsense defence that gets brought up in FreeCAD's defence a lot.
That defence is used for $SUPERIOR_LANGUAGE too. Look at the large numbers of devs who feel that the extra cognitive load needed to learn (for example) monads is worth it.
Or the large number of posts explaining Rusts syntactical mess as "It's doing a complicated job so the interface has to be complicated."
Hell, nevermind languages, that argument gets thrown across the entire tech stack - the submission yesterday about complexity had a number of posters who felt that there's no additional complexity in using Kubernetes even for an application that never needs to scale horizontally!
Is it any surprise then that we see the same argument for different tech, even though it's a clearly invalid argument 99% of the time.
No, it's not surprising. It's a failure of abstraction design. But that's ok, designing a good abstraction that correctly hides things that can be hidden, in a composable, comprehensible way, is a really, really hard job. It's ok to fail at that.
What's not ok is denying that failure and gaslighting users into self-blame while preventing trying something better.
> What's not ok is denying that failure and gaslighting users into self-blame while preventing trying something better.
Forgive me, I wasn't attempting to imply that the practice is okay.
I was just pointing out that the practice is normal, across the entire tech stack.
It is common for people to reject high-cognitive load stuff, and at this point it is common to have others jump in with "they're dinosaurs resistant to change", "Every $TECH has a learning curve" or similar stuff.
People talk shit about CATIA all the time, and I never understand why. There are not many things that can do what CATIA does. Big assemblies, things with a huge number of moving parts, are all CATIA when they're not NX, because you actually can open them and move them around in it. Formula 1? CATIA. Large Hadron Collider? CATIA. Airbus? Guess what?
CATIA is rubbish. But everything else is way worse.
(Not GP) I've never used Catia and I'm not in mech eng, but to me FreeCAD seems like an MVP Fusion360 clone inexplicably made with a '90s GUI toolkit.
I'm glad it exists, and appreciate the herculean task that it is, it's just a shame, and it really is clunky/unintuitive compared to F360. Personally I think some focus on UI & polish would go a long way, drive more adoption, which is presumably somewhere on the long road to more support in development and funding.
I get the impression it's probably made by and for a few though, scratching an itch and not too bothered about adoption. Even among hobbyists it seems to be a fairly uncommon choice - pick a Youtube channel and it's usually Fusion360 I find (and as far as I've seen not sponsored, unlike Altium Designer say which is an even weirder (more limited/expensive) choice for a hobbyist).
As a hobbyist I can't imagine using anything but OpenSCAD. I know it's not comparable in capabilities and has its quirks, but it feels like Python for CAD - I get stuff done quick. It's so simple the cheatsheet covering 100% of commands takes up one page, so I don't need to waste time looking up details. And as it's all code it spares me from clicking through all kinds of menus.
I do miss FreeCAD's chamfer & fillet tools, though.
Where FreeCAD ought to be able to take over is in the things that are a bit more complex that OpenSCAD just doesn't have the tooling for. Multiple-part assemblies is one of them that immediately comes to mind, now that there's some reasonable FreeCAD functionality for it.
I use FreeCAD heavily, and I honestly love what I can do with it. In terms of results, it's fantastic.
But I agree with you about the UI -- it's straight up painful, and knowing how to work it doesn't make it less of a PITA. Especially when it comes to telling you what you've just done wrong. It's almost like it's just trying to torture you.
I really want to like FreeCAD, but the lack of a native assembly system is the top killer for me. I know that plugins exist, but they have too many steps involved. I want to be able to just click on two holes on different bodies and immediately mate them with a rotating joint. Other nits exist, and random crashes are a huge problem for me, but until FreeCAD has better assemblies, I'll sadly be stuck with the extremely user-hostile Fusion360.
Yeah, it's unfortunate. At best they're still 20 years behind the major players - I started working in Inventor in 05 and Solidworks in 08 and I'd gladly take those out of date versions over current FreeCAD.
Its impressive what they've managed to do (geometry kernels are incredibly difficult) but its got a long way to go. I'm begrudgingly using Solid Edge Community at the moment.
0.20.1 and 0.20.2 seem pretty solid so far but I’m not a pro CAD user. Just designing things for my 3D printer.
The assembly situation does suck. But I’ve been using Assembly 4 and that seems the easiest to understand.
But what’s worse is that as a non-cad person. It’s difficult to get started still. The information is there but I’ve been using FreeCAD for years, and often the best place to look is YouTube for help.
I’ve also found the forum a bit hostile because I ask stupid questions since I don’t know how to ask in the right way with the right words.
I didn’t even realise why I might need an assembly workbench until very recently and then that changed my perspective on how I structured all my models. I wish there was a higher level explanation of how to use FreeCAD for complete beginners.
I guess it will never rival F360 or any professional packages. But if you’re like me and designing relatively simple things for 3D printing, it’s perfectly capable. You just need to be made aware from the beginning and understand how to structure your project.
> I’ve also found the forum a bit hostile because I ask stupid questions since I don’t know how to ask in the right way with the right words.
Oh, yes, so much this. I dislike the forums, and certainly wouldn't ask any questions on them. When I use them, it's to browse through and hope someone else has already asked the question and received a useful answer.
I recommend the assembly3 addon, written by one of the developers responsible for solving the hierarchical naming issue. the core of FreeCAD is capable of assembly based workflows, it just isn't a built-in feature/workbench yet.
I've just started trying to use FreeCAD for woodworking projects, and currently find the designing of separate parts and connecting them to be very difficult to understand.
a2plus is the most user friendly of the three. assembly4 has no direct lineage to assembly3 (confusingly). A4 uses local coordinate systems to place parts where A3 uses a constraint solver. there is a good overview here: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Assembly
>> . At a few points during this discussion there was a complaint, and another person would respond with "but you can work around that by"... which does not invalidate the complaint. Or "oh, we have that feature, you just can't find it"... also still a valid complaint.
This is a meta complaint I have with a LOT of software. The problem AFAICT stems from how we create software. For a developer the idea of editing a configuration file or other tedious minutia to get what we want isn't a big deal. It IS to "normal" users of software. A lot of times a developer will appreciate a simple way to do something even if they don't see it as being worth the time to implement.
There is a reason people love Solvespace over FreeCAD even though it is incredibly limited in comparison. What it does, it does well by users and is even a joy to use in comparison. All software can benefit from going beyond "there exists a way to do what you want".
I struggle to work with people can justify just about any complaint. Before I know it, I have suggestions to put wordy explanations everywhere, and a dozen unrelated buttons on a given page. All because three or four people who may not have been paying attention while they did the thing provided feedback… sometimes there are people who don’t even use the software….
I wish I could find a reliable way of getting feedback from a broad range of users not just a handful who wish to complain.
I want the software to work for most people who:
1. Use the software.
2. Are trying.
3. Are reasonably good at their job.
Sometimes I feel like I’m asked to make changes that hurt the majority at the behest of a few.
Oh I get that we have to decide what's worth doing and what's not. My point is that developers have some very different ideas about what's easy or reasonable. Just try to take that into account when deciding what's relevant. Think of as a bias that complicates an already subjective decision.
I think you're describing biases in your sampling methodology.
When folks do surveys do political polls, for example, the worst & lowest quality polls are basically facebook polls because individuals select themselves by clicking an ad.
Higher quality polls work by having a representative sample of the population, and getting that is very difficult & time consuming.
In software, I think you have two options here:
- it is practical to capture analytics from about 100% of the population, so if it's possible to analyze this data to determine if your software works well, great!
- you can work hard to get feedback from a representative cohort. not sure how to do this... gift cards, swag, "you're part of the cool users club" communications? But be sure you're the one doing the sampling, and vet users' demographics (whatever that means for you) yourself.
Yes, both suffer from self-selection and also survivorship bias, however these steps further worsen that.
It also depends what your goals as a project are - if you just want to build better software for your existing power-users, then great. If you want to become the next blender, you need to understand why people are using Maya/3DS Max instead (or in this example, why some people try to migrate to FreeCAD and fall back to using AutoCAD).
It looks like the author was following this as much as possible though - i.e. not just focussing on some workarounds that a power-user had and focussing on how users should be able to do things easily without a lot of knowledge. The worlds most-used applications lower their barrier to entry as much as possible.
N.B. I'm a mod of r/SolveSpace community on Reddit.[0]
> There is a reason people love Solvespace over FreeCAD even though it is incredibly limited in comparison.
As a SolveSpace user for nearly a decade, who started to learn FreeCAD last month, I may say that both apps has own pros'n'cons: SolveSpace has simpler UI (but lack of features for experts), while FreeCAD has a lot of features (but UI to complex for "normal" users).
About "limited in comparison", he is may latest quick comparison of both apps:[1]
SolveSpace is a good "Stage 1" tool for sketching ideas, while FreeCAD is more like "Stage 2" tool for converting sketch into real product. SolveSpace exported DXF (2D & 3D wireframe) & STL/OBJ (mesh) could be used as a base for FreeCAD and other apps (Blender, LibreCAD).[2]
While SolveSpace is not a competitor to FreeCAD, it still could be used for design wide range of complex things for 3D printing or shop drawings, including assemblies.[3,4,5,6]
The main problem of SolveSpace, is that it still has broken STEP export, as a result exported solid surfaces are non-manifold and after import into FreeCAD it is almost unusable (it may require a lot of work with "Shape builder" and "Surface" Workbench to revert it back to solid body).[7]
There are also many NURBS & mesh issues in SolveSpace worse to fix.[8]
I actually used SolveSpace as an onramp to FreeCAD while I was learning, entirely accidentally and unintentionally. There's enough overlap that what I learned on SolveSpace helped me to figure out what FreeCAD must be doing, so I knew that there was something to look for and the sort of things to search for. The fact that SolveSpace is a more limited tool makes it a very useful learning environment.
> The fact that SolveSpace is a more limited tool makes it a very useful learning environment.
Yes, and SolveSpace still could be used as a sketchbook for quickly sketching 3D shapes for FreeCAD. If only FreeCAD's Skethcer" Workbench would has "SolveSpace mode", it would be much easier to make things.
FTR, Here are my latest quick tips on using both apps together:[0]
It needs the will to follow through on major UI upheaval the way Blender did. Right now they're high on their own supply. Getting toponaming fixed will probably help, but I'll be surprised if it's enough.
It's an interesting question actually. How did blender leads turned the problem around and manage to refocus volunteers energy into a coherent improving roadmap.
Blender as an open source project was borne out of a company that ceased to exist. It has had multiple people working on it full time with a product mindset from the very onset. This is very different from largely volunteer/spare time projects like FreeCAD. Both are great though :)
Maybe. Blender has had an organization behind it for about 20 years [1]. FreeCAD formed its organization less than 2 years ago [2].
It'll be a while no matter what, but their success will largely depend on how well their roadmap aligns with the needs of their potential financial backers.
I love FreeCAD. It’s not the most fully featured CAD software of course, but I love that my designs are not encumbered behind a paywall or a freemium model that will go away when it becomes inconvenient for someone.
FreeCAD is my current go-to CAD program. I’m really glad I finally took the time to learn it.
To chime in with my own learning experience so far.
I've done the standard: Google "freecad tutorial", click open a bunch of likely-looking result tabs, and have a quick browse to locate quality. From youtube, to written and illustrated guides, etc.
It's not difficult to find useful instruction. But the overall pool of easily-searchable knowledge suffers from that standard internet Time Fragmentation effect : that is, within months and years of publication, most of it is out of date by anywhere ranging from A Little to A Lot; a degree which is only determinable to the casual reader through trial-and-error. So a certain degree of inefficiency and double-work is near guaranteed.
I think I watched a couple of videos - really just to get going from the "How do I make a block that looks like this?" I didn't initially understand the idea of workbenches so just having someone say "Do this here" helped. A recent example of using a video to help me understand was how to generate a bevel gear.
After that, I would run into questions and google searches tend to help a lot. Just last week I was trying to figure out how to cut a hole in a curved surface and found a forum thread that suggested a good solution. (That solution felt a little weird from a design standpoint, but it worked, and the history was maintainable.)
Searchable forums are tremendously useful for software packages at this level.
Recently started with FreeCAD because for [reasons] Fusion360 no longer worked. So I gave in and gave FreeCAD a chance. At first I tried without reading documentation and simply clicking around. Quite difficult.
But start reading some docs and watch a turorial on how to use sketches and it makes a lot of sense.
Very happy to "own" my own CAD package as well. Got really tired of the SaaS nature of Fusion.
It is possible (and pretty easy) to use FreeCAD in a way that it will generate faulty STL files. It all depends on how you did the modelling in FreeCAD. I think it's an example of how there are many ways to accomplish something in it, but some of those ways are wrong -- and you won't know it at the time.
What I do when I get a faulty STL out of it is to use other programs to fix the STL. That gets me there. And many slicers these days (especially Prusa) are getting much better at doing this themselves, making it less necessary to do it as a separate step.
I do a lot of this. Sometimes I do notice PrusaSlicer complaining about the geometry, but I can't remember seeing an instance where the export was broken beyond the slicer's ability to cope with it.
There might be something specific in your workflow that's running into a bug I see though. If you still see problems today it might be worth a bug report.
Just to add to this: 0.18 was the first version of FreeCAD I ever used. 0.20.2 is dramatically better in several important respects, to the point where 0.19 and even 0.20.0 feel like major regressions if I ever have to open them. It's well worth giving newer versions a try.
Hey there. Yes, I've had really good luck with exporting STL (and STEP) files for slicing in Cura or Prusa Slicer. My STEP files have been imported into MasterCAM for generating CNC milling gcode and it seems good.
As mentioned in a previous reply, a lot has been improved in three years so it's probably worth giving it another go and filing a bug if you find an issue.
Yes, it works fine since years. I have made around 200 objects (and many iterations on each) using the Part Design workbench, that have been 3d printed with Cura. STL export has never been a problem.
I work in 3d modeling for a living and I have tried freecad so many times I have lost count. I am glad they work to provide a product for the people that find it useful, but I personally find it completely unintuitive. It just takes too many steps to do things that are a single action in ever other package. I want to like it, and I give it another shot a couple times a year, but I just can't get in sync with whatever the intended workflow was meant to be.
I found actual parametric modeling to be fairly straightfoward once you get used to all the commands, but things like Assembly which should be an integral part of CAD are far behind.
In solidworks, its super easy to create an assembly, import your parts, set the constraints, see how things move, and measure distances.
In Freecad, you have to use external workbenches, and it seems like there are 5 that do the above to a certain extent but not fully, and with many more steps.
I have been forcing myself to use FreeCAD after I switched to linux and I could no longer use my spacemouse[1] in Fusion 360. Fusion 360 also started removing more features and then removed access to the browser version even thought I was paying for an expensive subscription.
It is an uphill battle as Fusion360 is very intuitive and forgiving while FreeCAD can do most of the same things but you need to do it the right way. Especially changing for example dimensions later on can break the whole thing.
FreeCAD seems to suffer under a sort of feature creep, there are multiple ways and buttons to do the same thing but not exactly the same. For example an extrusion.
I wish there was a general overhaul of the UI similar to what was done in blender which is a joy to use even thought it is extremely complex.
However every time someone does ask me which parametric 3d tool they should learn I say go with FreeCAD. For a beginner the learning curve is the same as for Fusion 360 and in the end you will be much better off no matter what. (I wasted to much time exporting MY 3d models from Fusion360)
> FreeCAD seems to suffer under a sort of feature creep, there are multiple ways and buttons to do the same thing but not exactly the same. For example an extrusion.
Or how there are like 2 or 3 different "2D editors", each with different set of features.
I too had to bail out of Fusion and landed in FreeCAD quite happily.
There’s a tendency to be unable to delete things that work in large collaboratively developed software. But it feels like that’s what’s needed with regards to the legacy workbenches so that new users don’t go astray from the intended path.
I recently got into Blender mostly for Hard Surface Modeling. I always wanted to try FreeCAD but never was sure if it is worth it. Blender is certainly no CAD software but it is incredibly powerful and with the right plugins it kind of can almost disguise as a CAD app.
If we disregard the different paradigms for a moment: What can FreeCAD do, that Blender can't? Should I give it a try?
I don't see blender as a dimensional accurate parametric CAD tool although it may be able to do that.
In FreeCAD and others like Fusion 360 you create sketches on planes with dimensions that can be variables. You then extrude, make more sketches based on previous features etc. This allows you at a later time to change the value of a dimension and it propagates through the entire part.
When it comes to 3d printing I use this a lot of things like lids which need to snap on. There is a certain amount of spacing between the lid of the box which may need to be adjusted to get the right amount of "snap". With parametric modeling I can just go and adjust the variable of my gap to be a bit smaller or larger and it will adjust all places where this applies.
There are ways to do this in Blender. I typically select all objects, hit tab to go into Edit Mode, turn on X-Ray Mode, Select all vertices that I want to move, move them (with snap) to the vertex I want to key off of (limiting movement to a specific axis), and then finally moving them again by entering the value of the distance (again, limiting movement to a specific axis).
For folks considering starting in FreeCAD, the _Hackspace_ folks did a series of articles which they have collected as a "Bookazine" which is distributed as a free PDF:
>For anyone who prints this out, they failed to insert a page 25, so if you’re printing double-sided, print up through pg. 24, then print page 26 separately, then print pages 27 onward to get things to back up properly.
I tried FreeCAD last year, and exporting for 3D printing led to round parts being made of distinct 'faces' instead of anything close to round. I never could figure out how to solve that.
In general I found it almost comically hard to use, but I learned on Fusion360 so I imagine I don't have the experience of someone who learned on older CAD software that was similar in UI.
In case it helps: Mesh Design workbench > Meshes > Create Mesh from Shape... > select your object; set surface and angular deviation to something small like 1 µm and 1° > OK > select the newly generated mesh > File > Export... > to STL / OBJ / your preferred 3D printing format.
Yes, it should be easier than this. The STL export preferences should allow you to specify a mesh tolerance for the export process. I'm sure that's how it will work in a future version, but this is how you can do it now.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadThank you.
>> Yes, SolidWorks is easy to pick up and use with no training. FreeCAD is not; it requires dedicated time to learn, following tutorials, and at least a few throw-away projects to gain proficiency. There are a lot of easy mistakes that can sabotage progress, and multiple ways of doing things that are different under the hood, where those differences aren't obvious, including some ways that are bad and wrong. But there's a lot it can do, and it gets better all the time.
> My goal was to produce the design, not to master design tool. The less time I spent the better is my ROI. I have neither time nor desire to dedicate myself to be a master of particular tool.
This is actually how a lot of the "Niche language $FOO is a superior language" arguments go.
That defence is used for $SUPERIOR_LANGUAGE too. Look at the large numbers of devs who feel that the extra cognitive load needed to learn (for example) monads is worth it.
Or the large number of posts explaining Rusts syntactical mess as "It's doing a complicated job so the interface has to be complicated."
Hell, nevermind languages, that argument gets thrown across the entire tech stack - the submission yesterday about complexity had a number of posters who felt that there's no additional complexity in using Kubernetes even for an application that never needs to scale horizontally!
Is it any surprise then that we see the same argument for different tech, even though it's a clearly invalid argument 99% of the time.
What's not ok is denying that failure and gaslighting users into self-blame while preventing trying something better.
Forgive me, I wasn't attempting to imply that the practice is okay.
I was just pointing out that the practice is normal, across the entire tech stack.
It is common for people to reject high-cognitive load stuff, and at this point it is common to have others jump in with "they're dinosaurs resistant to change", "Every $TECH has a learning curve" or similar stuff.
CATIA is rubbish. But everything else is way worse.
I did not need to assemble the airplane / LHC so this particular benefit you are describing is / was completely irrelevant to me.
I'm glad it exists, and appreciate the herculean task that it is, it's just a shame, and it really is clunky/unintuitive compared to F360. Personally I think some focus on UI & polish would go a long way, drive more adoption, which is presumably somewhere on the long road to more support in development and funding.
I get the impression it's probably made by and for a few though, scratching an itch and not too bothered about adoption. Even among hobbyists it seems to be a fairly uncommon choice - pick a Youtube channel and it's usually Fusion360 I find (and as far as I've seen not sponsored, unlike Altium Designer say which is an even weirder (more limited/expensive) choice for a hobbyist).
I do miss FreeCAD's chamfer & fillet tools, though.
You might be interested in CadQuery:
https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery
But I agree with you about the UI -- it's straight up painful, and knowing how to work it doesn't make it less of a PITA. Especially when it comes to telling you what you've just done wrong. It's almost like it's just trying to torture you.
Being the first one, and with some concern about limited space, we did not broadcast it super-widely. With good reason, too, since it was packed.
Its impressive what they've managed to do (geometry kernels are incredibly difficult) but its got a long way to go. I'm begrudgingly using Solid Edge Community at the moment.
0.20.1 and 0.20.2 seem pretty solid so far but I’m not a pro CAD user. Just designing things for my 3D printer.
The assembly situation does suck. But I’ve been using Assembly 4 and that seems the easiest to understand.
But what’s worse is that as a non-cad person. It’s difficult to get started still. The information is there but I’ve been using FreeCAD for years, and often the best place to look is YouTube for help.
I’ve also found the forum a bit hostile because I ask stupid questions since I don’t know how to ask in the right way with the right words.
I didn’t even realise why I might need an assembly workbench until very recently and then that changed my perspective on how I structured all my models. I wish there was a higher level explanation of how to use FreeCAD for complete beginners.
Unfortunately, as I understand it, the only way to truly get rid of that is to entirely rewrite the geometry kernel. :(
The team is working on a merge, but it's a big merge.
To be clear, it is not a dev branch, but RealThunder's Link branch (FreeCADLink is a fork of FreeCAD).
For topology naming, here is dev branch[0,1]
[0] https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/tree/development/toponami...
[1] https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-Bundle/releases/tag/topo-...
Though the one feature I miss from Fusion 360 is the thread plugin. It's not perfect but the custom thread profiles were way more powerful than F360.
I'm surprised nothing has been done with the BRL-CAD kernel.
This is a much bigger problem than any missing features or UX issues with the software, and much harder to fix.
Oh, yes, so much this. I dislike the forums, and certainly wouldn't ask any questions on them. When I use them, it's to browse through and hope someone else has already asked the question and received a useful answer.
I've just started trying to use FreeCAD for woodworking projects, and currently find the designing of separate parts and connecting them to be very difficult to understand.
This is a meta complaint I have with a LOT of software. The problem AFAICT stems from how we create software. For a developer the idea of editing a configuration file or other tedious minutia to get what we want isn't a big deal. It IS to "normal" users of software. A lot of times a developer will appreciate a simple way to do something even if they don't see it as being worth the time to implement.
There is a reason people love Solvespace over FreeCAD even though it is incredibly limited in comparison. What it does, it does well by users and is even a joy to use in comparison. All software can benefit from going beyond "there exists a way to do what you want".
I struggle to work with people can justify just about any complaint. Before I know it, I have suggestions to put wordy explanations everywhere, and a dozen unrelated buttons on a given page. All because three or four people who may not have been paying attention while they did the thing provided feedback… sometimes there are people who don’t even use the software….
I wish I could find a reliable way of getting feedback from a broad range of users not just a handful who wish to complain.
I want the software to work for most people who:
1. Use the software.
2. Are trying.
3. Are reasonably good at their job.
Sometimes I feel like I’m asked to make changes that hurt the majority at the behest of a few.
When folks do surveys do political polls, for example, the worst & lowest quality polls are basically facebook polls because individuals select themselves by clicking an ad.
Higher quality polls work by having a representative sample of the population, and getting that is very difficult & time consuming.
In software, I think you have two options here:
- it is practical to capture analytics from about 100% of the population, so if it's possible to analyze this data to determine if your software works well, great! - you can work hard to get feedback from a representative cohort. not sure how to do this... gift cards, swag, "you're part of the cool users club" communications? But be sure you're the one doing the sampling, and vet users' demographics (whatever that means for you) yourself.
It also depends what your goals as a project are - if you just want to build better software for your existing power-users, then great. If you want to become the next blender, you need to understand why people are using Maya/3DS Max instead (or in this example, why some people try to migrate to FreeCAD and fall back to using AutoCAD).
It looks like the author was following this as much as possible though - i.e. not just focussing on some workarounds that a power-user had and focussing on how users should be able to do things easily without a lot of knowledge. The worlds most-used applications lower their barrier to entry as much as possible.
> There is a reason people love Solvespace over FreeCAD even though it is incredibly limited in comparison.
As a SolveSpace user for nearly a decade, who started to learn FreeCAD last month, I may say that both apps has own pros'n'cons: SolveSpace has simpler UI (but lack of features for experts), while FreeCAD has a lot of features (but UI to complex for "normal" users).
About "limited in comparison", he is may latest quick comparison of both apps:[1]
SolveSpace is a good "Stage 1" tool for sketching ideas, while FreeCAD is more like "Stage 2" tool for converting sketch into real product. SolveSpace exported DXF (2D & 3D wireframe) & STL/OBJ (mesh) could be used as a base for FreeCAD and other apps (Blender, LibreCAD).[2]
While SolveSpace is not a competitor to FreeCAD, it still could be used for design wide range of complex things for 3D printing or shop drawings, including assemblies.[3,4,5,6]
The main problem of SolveSpace, is that it still has broken STEP export, as a result exported solid surfaces are non-manifold and after import into FreeCAD it is almost unusable (it may require a lot of work with "Shape builder" and "Surface" Workbench to revert it back to solid body).[7]
There are also many NURBS & mesh issues in SolveSpace worse to fix.[8]
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/solvespace
[1] https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/109812747058078617
[2] https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/109813465975914195
[3] https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/109740222184364152
[4] https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/107098074104816439
[5] https://fosstodon.org/@app4soft/109804453127760634
[6] https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1479875838451585026
[7] https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/206
[8] https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/738
Yes, and SolveSpace still could be used as a sketchbook for quickly sketching 3D shapes for FreeCAD. If only FreeCAD's Skethcer" Workbench would has "SolveSpace mode", it would be much easier to make things.
FTR, Here are my latest quick tips on using both apps together:[0]
[0] https://www.patreon.com/posts/faq-how-to-use-78302533 (public post; no paywall)
It'll be a while no matter what, but their success will largely depend on how well their roadmap aligns with the needs of their potential financial backers.
[1] https://www.blender.org/about/
[2] https://fpa.freecad.org/
https://hackspace.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad
(check the pagination if you're going to print it, missing page 25 last I checked)
FreeCAD is my current go-to CAD program. I’m really glad I finally took the time to learn it.
I've done the standard: Google "freecad tutorial", click open a bunch of likely-looking result tabs, and have a quick browse to locate quality. From youtube, to written and illustrated guides, etc.
It's not difficult to find useful instruction. But the overall pool of easily-searchable knowledge suffers from that standard internet Time Fragmentation effect : that is, within months and years of publication, most of it is out of date by anywhere ranging from A Little to A Lot; a degree which is only determinable to the casual reader through trial-and-error. So a certain degree of inefficiency and double-work is near guaranteed.
After that, I would run into questions and google searches tend to help a lot. Just last week I was trying to figure out how to cut a hole in a curved surface and found a forum thread that suggested a good solution. (That solution felt a little weird from a design standpoint, but it worked, and the history was maintainable.)
Searchable forums are tremendously useful for software packages at this level.
But start reading some docs and watch a turorial on how to use sketches and it makes a lot of sense.
Very happy to "own" my own CAD package as well. Got really tired of the SaaS nature of Fusion.
I want to script up these models in python, but if I can't print them then it's not useful to me.
Can you share a FreeCAD project & the generated broken STL file and I'll see if I can reproduce the problem?
What I do when I get a faulty STL out of it is to use other programs to fix the STL. That gets me there. And many slicers these days (especially Prusa) are getting much better at doing this themselves, making it less necessary to do it as a separate step.
There might be something specific in your workflow that's running into a bug I see though. If you still see problems today it might be worth a bug report.
As mentioned in a previous reply, a lot has been improved in three years so it's probably worth giving it another go and filing a bug if you find an issue.
In solidworks, its super easy to create an assembly, import your parts, set the constraints, see how things move, and measure distances.
In Freecad, you have to use external workbenches, and it seems like there are 5 that do the above to a certain extent but not fully, and with many more steps.
It is an uphill battle as Fusion360 is very intuitive and forgiving while FreeCAD can do most of the same things but you need to do it the right way. Especially changing for example dimensions later on can break the whole thing.
FreeCAD seems to suffer under a sort of feature creep, there are multiple ways and buttons to do the same thing but not exactly the same. For example an extrusion.
I wish there was a general overhaul of the UI similar to what was done in blender which is a joy to use even thought it is extremely complex.
However every time someone does ask me which parametric 3d tool they should learn I say go with FreeCAD. For a beginner the learning curve is the same as for Fusion 360 and in the end you will be much better off no matter what. (I wasted to much time exporting MY 3d models from Fusion360)
[1] https://3dconnexion.com/uk/spacemouse/
Or how there are like 2 or 3 different "2D editors", each with different set of features.
There’s a tendency to be unable to delete things that work in large collaboratively developed software. But it feels like that’s what’s needed with regards to the legacy workbenches so that new users don’t go astray from the intended path.
If we disregard the different paradigms for a moment: What can FreeCAD do, that Blender can't? Should I give it a try?
In FreeCAD and others like Fusion 360 you create sketches on planes with dimensions that can be variables. You then extrude, make more sketches based on previous features etc. This allows you at a later time to change the value of a dimension and it propagates through the entire part.
When it comes to 3d printing I use this a lot of things like lids which need to snap on. There is a certain amount of spacing between the lid of the box which may need to be adjusted to get the right amount of "snap". With parametric modeling I can just go and adjust the variable of my gap to be a bit smaller or larger and it will adjust all places where this applies.
https://hackspace.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad
Note/check:
>For anyone who prints this out, they failed to insert a page 25, so if you’re printing double-sided, print up through pg. 24, then print page 26 separately, then print pages 27 onward to get things to back up properly.
In general I found it almost comically hard to use, but I learned on Fusion360 so I imagine I don't have the experience of someone who learned on older CAD software that was similar in UI.
Yes, it should be easier than this. The STL export preferences should allow you to specify a mesh tolerance for the export process. I'm sure that's how it will work in a future version, but this is how you can do it now.