[HN Gopher] FreeCAD 0.20 Release Notes
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FreeCAD 0.20 Release Notes
Author : gsg001
Score : 181 points
Date : 2022-06-16 08:58 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.freecadweb.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.freecadweb.org)
| ur-whale wrote:
| FreeCAD is "feature full", but ... bearer of bad news here
| (sorry): 1. The UI is simply *awful*. Reminds me
| of the bad old days of Blender. Feels like a Motif style UI from
| the 90's TBH. Freecad needs to do what Blender did, bite the
| bullet hard and redo the UI from scratch to bring it into the
| 21st century. 2. The underlying NURBS engine
| (OpenCascade) is what's best in the FOSS world, but unfortunately
| it can't hold a candle to the "kernels" (CAD lingo for engine)
| that power equivalent commercial offerings (Fusion, Rhino,
| SolidWorks, CATIA, etc...)
|
| Finally, I really wish FreeCAD had an OpenSCAD-like domain
| specific language for modeling that can directly create NURBS
| (there is a kind of an OpenSCAD integration, but it can only do
| poly meshes).
| inamberclad wrote:
| I like FreeCAD a lot, but it's too hard to create assemblies and
| reference other bodies in an assembly. I gave up and moved to
| Fusion360 where all these things Just Work.
|
| However, I miss the KiCAD plugin with really good integration for
| the updating board outline and component placements from CAD.
| jbay808 wrote:
| I find the FreeCAD shapebinder system for external references
| is a lot more stable and maintainable than, say, external
| references in SolidWorks. It takes more clicks and more work
| though.
| sschueller wrote:
| I have canceled my auto renewal for Fusion 360 as I have moved
| completely to Linux and their product does not work without
| using an unofficial Wine setup (also my space mouse does not
| work in Wine, it works perfectly in FreeCAD and Blender). They
| do have a web version but it is not available to paying
| customers?! They also keep removing features from the paid
| version I have. I'm done with this garbage. I can't even easily
| export my work.
|
| I tried a few times to switch but now I have to.
|
| What's really cool is how easily I can export Kicad projects
| and import them into blender. Check out my latest PCB render:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svU7NyfJJKY
| btreecat wrote:
| This seems like a really exciting release with all the
| improvements to the sketch workbench in particular. I look
| forward to installing the update!
| jemzipx wrote:
| FreeCAD deserves a lot more recognition. It is literally the only
| serious open source contender to commercial CAD softwares. There
| has been a lot of recent positive developments including
| Realthunder's continuous effort to solve topological naming
| problem. I use FreeCAD as my daily CAD software to design some
| fairly complex assemblies and it has become a joy to use. Hope we
| can get more developers and companies behind it and witness the
| same revolution that happened with Blender.
| stavros wrote:
| That's fantastic to hear, I've been wanting to switch to it for
| a while, as I hate how closed the commercial CAD programs are,
| but I've never put in the effort due to its various issues.
|
| Would you say it's as good as OnShape nowadays, in terms of
| ease of use/stability?
| jemzipx wrote:
| Definitely. I'd recommend using FreeCAD Linkstage3 for now as
| it has a fix for topo naming problem and a variety of other
| improvements. For tutorial, I highly recommend
| OficineRobotica youtube channel. His videos are the best
| educational stuff I know of. With some practice you can learn
| proper workflow which prevents a lot of problems down the
| line.
| stavros wrote:
| Fantastic, thanks for the tips!
| gaze wrote:
| I don't think it's anywhere close in terms of usability, but
| it is very powerful and capable.
| flaviut wrote:
| I want to point out that FreeCAD receives $450/week in recurring
| donations (https://liberapay.com/FreeCAD/), and that that
| probably has some impact on how quickly things are moving now!
|
| I personally do CAD less than once a month, but I still donate
| regularly. If open source CAD is a cause you care about, you can
| too!
| [deleted]
| leoedin wrote:
| FreeCAD is a sprawling, incredibly feature filled piece of
| software that's slowly but surely becoming bug free enough to be
| usable. It's really impressive how many different aspects of it
| are under active development - and for simple things the part
| design workshop is really usable.
|
| The biggest thing I'm looking forward to (assuming it ever
| happens) is the selection of a single "assembly" workbench.
| There's a whole load of assembly extensions, all of which take
| different approaches. A single "official" assembly workbench
| would give me the confidence to sink time into big, assembly
| heavy designs and know that it wouldn't all be wasted by the next
| release.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Same here -- I taught myself CAD via FreeCAD tutorials and a
| month of making one-a-day household items, but ultimately I
| moved on to other tools (Fusion 360, Shapr3D) for better
| assembly support as I got into real-world uses.
| john_yaya wrote:
| I really wanted to like FreeCAD, but I'd say out of the five or
| so times I've attempted to use it, it crashed and lost my design
| four times. I picked up Fusion360 instead, then OnShape, and
| never looked back.
| ssl232 wrote:
| I noticed in the Assembly3 section that it uses SolveSpace as its
| solver. FreeCAD uses OpenCASCADE as its main CAD kernel, and this
| supports mating and constraints between parts (at least, CadQuery
| supports it, and it's essentially just wrapping OpenCASCADE) so
| I'd be interested to know why they chose to bundle and use a
| different kernel there.
| jemzipx wrote:
| Assembly3 support various backends including Solvespace, and
| another using Sympy and SciPy. Realthunder mentioned he was
| working on supporting FreeCAD interal solver so I guess it is
| still WIP.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I noticed in the Assembly3 section that it uses SolveSpace
| as its solver. FreeCAD uses OpenCASCADE as its main CAD kernel,
| and this supports mating and constraints between parts (at
| least, CadQuery supports it, and it's essentially just wrapping
| OpenCASCADE) so I'd be interested to know why they chose to
| bundle and use a different kernel there.
|
| AFAICT OpenCASCADE does not include a geometric constraint
| solver like the one in SolveSpace. There are companies
| licensing such things for use in OpenCascade derived products.
| I think OCCT is used in FreeCAD for reading/writing files,
| handling all 3D geometry and NURBS operations and rendering.
| Only the constraint solver from Solvespace is being used in
| FreeCAD (and only in one workbench), as there isn't an
| equivalent in OCCT. The Solvespace geometric kernel is not as
| mature or complete as OCCT, but it is about 100 times smaller.
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