[HN Gopher] The first release candidate of FreeCAD 1.0 is out
___________________________________________________________________
The first release candidate of FreeCAD 1.0 is out
Author : jstanley
Score : 338 points
Date : 2024-09-11 20:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.freecad.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.freecad.org)
| taeric wrote:
| Oh wow, super excited to see this posted. Will be on the lookout
| for updated tutorials. If anyone has good suggestions there, I'm
| game to check them out.
| cristoperb wrote:
| I recently found this youtuber. He has a playlist for 0.22
| (which is the dev version for what will be 1.0):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc3UYXXfSglV...
| Palomides wrote:
| prelininary release notes:
| https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0
|
| the headliner is definitely topological naming improvements
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| I would say the most significant things for most hobby CAD
| users are:
|
| * topological naming issue mitigations -- this is mostly solved
| enough that you can rely on it, though there are definitely
| still times when it makes more sense to use sketches offset
| from the base planes
|
| * the new integrated Assembly workbench (and solver) though
| I've not dabbled with this myself
|
| * really significant improvements in the sketcher (easier
| dimensioning, curved slots, polar arrays and improvements to
| the array tools controls, offset/scale, automatic midpoint
| constraints)
|
| * support for bodies with multiple non-overlapping solids in
| Part Design
|
| * useful subtle improvements to Part Design array tools
|
| * some support for operations (pads/revolves/pockets) on only
| selected shapes from a sketch in Part Design
|
| * I don't do CNC yet but I think there are improvements in the
| CNC workbench that would benefit hobbyists.
|
| I would put the UI improvements somewhere lower down the list,
| frankly, than they do, because I find them often confusing and
| regularly frustrating on laptop screens, but:
|
| * the new dark theme is really nice
|
| * OpenTheme's dark theme works well
|
| * quick transparency toggling is helpful
|
| * and the optional tab bar for workbench switching helps make
| various disparate workbench tools just that much quicker to get
| to, somehow, making it all feel a little closer-knit
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| Polar arrays will bring me running back to FreeCAD. There are
| some geometries that are really hard to sketch if you can't
| use polar arrays.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > the new integrated Assembly workbench (and solver) though
| I've not dabbled with this myself
|
| FreeCad badly needed this. I will try it out.
|
| Any complex drawing quickly go out of hand without
| assemblies.
|
| Also, finaly there seem to be some real measurement ulitity!
| 'Std Measure'.
|
| I've gone made trying to build some parts I made in FreeCad
| without a sane way to measure distances.
|
| I so want FreeCad to kick some entrenched corp ass.
| alright2565 wrote:
| IMO the biggest thing is the auto-dimension tool. Instead of
| remembering 10 different keyboard shortcuts or constantly
| having to click on the toolbar, I just need to remember a
| single shortcut.
| eig wrote:
| Super excited about this! I hope more people will pick it up in
| the hobbyist space now that Fusion costs money.
|
| I'm not sure what the popularity of these different CAD softwares
| are. I've seen quite a few hobbyists use OnShape recently, and a
| few people use OpenScad. I don't think I've seen another FreeCad
| user in real life though.
| luckydata wrote:
| Hope that the new changes make freecad a little more
| accessible. Coming from Fusion I really tried to make it work
| for me but the UI is so awkward and abstruse I quickly gave up.
| qwerpy wrote:
| > now that Fusion costs money
|
| I know they've been obnoxiously chipping away at the features
| available in their Personal edition and introducing artificial
| limitations. But my free installation still works and I haven't
| seen any indications that it's going away.
| joshvm wrote:
| Fusion as a CAD engine is great. I've not used the CAM side,
| and while I used to use Eagle a lot I've tried to invest more
| energy into Kicad. The online limitations are frustrating
| though. Randomly and inconsistently not being able to export
| STLs because of a "translation service error" (when it could
| 2 minutes ago), or the inability to make drawings with the
| free edition. I mostly use it because there isn't anything
| else half as good for OS X that works offline.
| dekhn wrote:
| Fusion 360 CAM is great for me (hobbyist doing CNC with
| wood and other materials). It's handled some pretty tough
| jobs, like a full topo map of california. It's why I pay
| for the product. I tried the electronics stuff in Fusion
| and decided not to use it because it didn't work nearly as
| well as Kicad.
| qwerpy wrote:
| I used it to do some sheet metal modeling, then sent the
| models off to a laser cutting/bending service that shipped
| me the pieces. Then I went back to Fusion to 3d print some
| brackets/scaffolding using the same sheet metal models as a
| reference, to assemble the pieces into the finished
| product. This was during a 3 month leave from work,
| starting from zero knowledge beforehand. It was probably
| the most fun I've had in years, and mostly thanks to how
| slick Fusion is and how many tutorials there are out there.
|
| There are some export formats that it uses cloud machines
| for, which I think is silly and arbitrary. It's probably
| done that way to upsell their premium product for faster
| wait times or unlimited quota. For my uses I was able to
| select formats that didn't require the cloud.
|
| Fusion is much more polished compared to FreeCAD and so I'm
| not sure if I'll ever end up making the switch. But I'm
| glad to see a free alternative, just in case.
| joshvm wrote:
| Most of the common translation options should work
| offline (ie Fusion is capable), but Fusion sometimes gets
| stuck in a weird state where it insists it needs
| connectivity. Perhaps it's a quota thing but I've never
| found it to be consistent. This happens fairly often with
| STLs for 3D printing.
|
| Once it's gotten into that hole it will often refuse to
| export any other format until connectivity is restored,
| even if the app is restarted. It's known behaviour, for
| example the official guidance is that changing binary to
| ascii might help, or you shouldn't export directly to a
| slicer when offline, or don't use certain menus. But it
| seems like a wontfix.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| OpenSCAD is definitely very popular in the
| maker/microcontroller/electronics world, which is both a good
| and bad thing, because it is accessible but also
| limited/frustrating. It enables some good stuff on Thingiverse
| but it becomes extremely mathematics-focussed quite quickly.
|
| I do wish more of the code-CAD people would look at Replicad,
| Build123D and CadQuery.
|
| I personally like FreeCAD a lot, but I won't push people onto
| it; if they like TinkerCad that's fine.
| aeonik wrote:
| I just looked at those other code CAD programs, and I don't
| see the appeal over OpenSCAD.
|
| I have no interest in browser based CAD programs because as
| models become complex, that platform is too limited in
| performance.
|
| Python and stateful CAD drawings sound like a nightmare to
| me.
|
| OpenSCAD has limitations for sure, but I think a better tool
| will look different.
|
| I do wish OpenSCAD used a more general purpose programming
| manager.
| hugs wrote:
| If OpenSCAD had STEP file support, I could do all my design
| work in it. But it can't, so I can't.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| Replicad is quicker to render complex things than OpenSCAD
| -- significantly quicker. It uses an emscripten port of
| OCC.
|
| It's also embeddable as a library, which means being able
| to make web-based object customisers: client-side, script-
| driven tools that don't require CAD knowledge for the user.
| Like the Thingiverse customiser but on steroids. It's a
| fascinating project.
|
| And I think it's not the _statefulness_ that is the
| significant thing about CadQuery and Build123D. It 's the
| access to a bRep kernel, so you can do operations with
| faces and vertices, you can reflect (analyse, measure) the
| model, etc.
|
| Being able to do operations on a generated face or edge
| means not needing to know (or recalculate) the location of
| that face in 3D space; it saves you so much in the way of
| maths.
|
| If you have very simple (or very mathematical!) models,
| OpenSCAD can help. But once things get complex you just
| have file after file of variable definitions.
|
| Functional flows on vertexes, edges and faces created by
| previous operations is much closer to a code equivalent of
| GUI CAD.
| kiba wrote:
| _Replicad is quicker to render complex things than
| OpenSCAD -- significantly quicker. It uses an emscripten
| port of OCC._
|
| OpenSCAD integrated manifold into its codebase though you
| would need to use a development build to actually use it
| since the last release is in 2021. I heard manifold is
| significantly faster than CGAL.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| That's good to know.
| bvrmn wrote:
| OpenSCAD basically has no tools to aid complex modeling.
| You have to know trigonometry and often use pen and paper
| to calculate points.
|
| Build123d has stateless algebra mode. And you could replace
| math with simple construction elements and simply ask
| intersection points.
| everforward wrote:
| > Python and stateful CAD drawings sound like a nightmare
| to me.
|
| Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't appear
| stateful to me. The context managers mostly make the
| organization of objects be reflected in the organization of
| the code.
|
| They're stateful in the sense that some bits are part of a
| larger assembly, but I think that's inherent in the domain.
| The features of the object have to relate to each other so
| it knows how to stitch the object together (eg which side
| of a face is external and which is internal).
| hugs wrote:
| I got into making all kinds of stuff because of OpenSCAD.
| It's just enough for 3D printing functional mechanical parts.
| It's still my first go-to for designs. The downside is
| OpenSCAD doesn't support import or export of STEP files... So
| I've also added FreeCAD to my toolbox. But I really wish
| OpenSCAD would/could do whatever refactor it needed to
| support STEP.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| Yes -- the STEP thing was a big part of why I wanted to
| switch.
|
| I actually switched via CadQuery: a few minutes with that
| made it clear that the bits I didn't understand (edges,
| faces, planes, all that stuff that freaked me out) were
| simple and logical and had a sort of common sense
| integrity, and that I might as well try to learn them in
| the context of FreeCAD.
|
| Had Build123D existed at that point, or Replicad, maybe I'd
| have pushed on for longer. Build123D is my "fallback
| toolbox" at this point.
|
| I don't think OpenSCAD can _produce_ STEP, ever. Importing
| it is another matter; that 's a one-way meshing operation.
| But creating it means having a kernel that understands more
| than CSG operations -- a bRep kernel like OpenCASCADE, that
| FreeCAD/Replicad/CadQuery/Build123D etc. use.
|
| You can of course run your OpenSCAD in FreeCAD, but certain
| operations (hulls, Minkowski I think?) end up as meshes,
| because there is no easy equivalent. Still, that's better
| than every operation ending up a mesh.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I like the idea of OpenSCAD but the language is too
| functional/immutable for my taste. It's interesting but
| having to rethink even algorithms with simple loops gets very
| tiring over time.
|
| A debugger would be very helpful to be able to step through
| the code.
| filcuk wrote:
| The rendering is also very slow, even on powerful machines.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| JSCAD is a thing:
|
| https://openjscad.xyz/
|
| But I really only fight with it because I know JS
| moderately well.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| Have you looked at Replicad?
|
| https://replicad.xyz
|
| Similar principles, but a bRep kernel so a much richer
| API.
| WillAdams wrote:
| There is now a Python-enabled version:
|
| https://pythonscad.org/
|
| Using the # operator to make things transparent red helps a
| lot when stepping/iterating through code.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I tried that but couldn't make it work on my M1 MacBook.
| Not sure why.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Please check in with the developer --- probably best to
| create an issue at Github:
|
| https://github.com/gsohler/openscad/issues
| eternityforest wrote:
| OpenSCAD is a counterfeit CAD! It doesn't Aid your Design so
| much as render one the user has to already understand. I do
| like it for simple parametric changes to existing models
| though.
|
| I wish we had something like it that could be used to create
| freeCAD macros, as in "Here's a sketch, which FreeCAD
| translates to OpenSCAD arrays, then runs a script that can do
| stuff with this model as input"
| bschwindHN wrote:
| Is that really "counterfeit"? As you mentioned, CAD is
| Computer-Aided Design, and OpenSCAD is certainly aiding in
| the design process by interpreting higher level commands
| about where to place geometry.
|
| I have a lot of criticisms for OpenSCAD but I wouldn't call
| it a counterfeit, it's just a code-based approach to
| constructing something vs. a GUI-based approach.
| eternityforest wrote:
| It's more of a joke/exaggeration, but it does explain why
| I find it to be so hard to use.
|
| It's much more of a one way conversation, if you can't
| imagine all the rotations to make a part do something,
| trial and error is very slow.
|
| Whereas in GUI CAD you mostly only have to be able to
| think in 2D.
|
| And without a constraint solver, you have to have a much
| deeper understanding of all the spatial relationships
| involved.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| Right -- OpenSCAD is an object compiler. You give it
| code, it gives you an object.
|
| Your object is not something that can then be used to
| iterate on, except by placing it in space and adding or
| subtracting other stuff to/from it.
|
| Have you looked at Build123D or CadQuery?
|
| Both are Python packages (different API styles,
| compatible underpinnings) that do OpenSCAD-type things,
| but using the OpenCASCADE bRep kernel, so it is less
| "counterfeit" -- if you want to do something based on a
| face or edge or vertex that was the product of a previous
| operation, you can. Both have some constraints support.
|
| In many ways they are both just a prettier alternative to
| the FreeCAD Python APIs -- indeed there was a CadQuery
| workbench for CadQuery 1.x.
| Macuyiko wrote:
| A few weeks ago I was planning to design a model I could send
| to a local 3d printer to replace a broken piece in the house
| for which I knew it would be impossible to find something
| that would fit exactly.
|
| I looked around through a couple of open source/free
| offerings and all found them frustrating. Either the focus on
| easy of use was too limiting, the focus was too much on blob,
| clay-like modeling rather than strong parametric models (many
| online tools), or they were too pushy to make you pay, or the
| UI was not intuitive (FreeCAD).
|
| OpenSCAD was the one which allowed me to get the model done,
| and I loved the code-first, parametric-first approach and way
| of thinking. But that said I also found POV-Ray enjoyable to
| play around with around the 2000s. Build123D looks
| interesting as well, thanks for recommending that.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| The major advantage of Build123D for your use case --
| sending it to someone else to fabricate it -- is STEP
| output support.
|
| This really expands your options for what you can make and
| who you can ask to make it. There are now some online
| fabrication places that will do CNC from mesh formats, but
| really the only way to have proper control is sending them
| a STEP file.
| stn8188 wrote:
| I'm also happy for this. I'm an EE with limited MCAD
| experience, so I usually hop onto Onshape when I need a custom
| trinket to 3D print. I did use FreeCAD for a small fixture for
| my day job earlier this year and I was pleasantly surprised.
| For someone with no experience, it worked very well and when I
| lose access to Onshape I'll definitely pick up more with
| FreeCAD.
| blihp wrote:
| I use FreeCAD on a very regular basis and can understand why
| it's not more popular: it's very powerful but has some very
| sharp edges that will often have me using it in a state of near
| rage. Topological naming comes to mind but there are other
| various issues that I've hit like a brick wall (in that you
| can't work around the bugs/limitations so much as you must
| rework your design to avoid them which can be tedious and
| frustrating) when designing something non-trivial.
|
| That said, each release continues to improve it just has
| further to go than most open source projects.
| daghamm wrote:
| I've always felt freecad being superior to most other free CAD
| tools.
|
| But I can almost never get it to work for me. Every time there is
| a new major release I try it only to rage quit two hours later.
| Really hope they get someone to help them with stability and UX
| improvements like Blender did.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| UX work is ongoing.
|
| Stability is good in the latest dev builds on the Mac, though
| 0.21.2 is the least crashy I've seen it.
|
| But if you mean stability in terms of model
| stability/robustness when changing things, that's improved a
| lot with the topological naming mitigations.
|
| It's still not perfect, and I still think FreeCAD is a
| lifestyle choice. But I enjoy working in it a lot more.
|
| The Mango Jelly Solutions videos on Youtube are very, very
| worth a watch if you feel inclined to have another go; they
| have been the best thing for getting my mind into how FreeCAD
| works as a package (in the sense that it is a "package" at all
| -- it's really still a collection of overlapping, macro-
| programmable toolsets gathered around a kernel).
| tpmoney wrote:
| I want to second the recommendation for Mango Jelly Solutions
| videos. I've tried FreeCAD on and off for years and those
| videos are the first ones that finally helped me wrap my head
| around some things and be able to use it for a real project.
| mort96 wrote:
| The thing I don't get is, it's over 20 years old. Surely if
| those th8ngs were ever going to improve they'd have done so
| over the past 20 years?
| tecleandor wrote:
| Blender changed, FreeCAD can. Just the topology naming fix
| is a HUGE change that lots of people could have said a
| couple years ago that it would never be fixed.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| CAD is never made quickly, I think.
|
| But FreeCAD was just not that sort of project. It's a C++
| and Python wrapper around a CAD kernel, supporting a set of
| tools -- some frustrating tools, some quite powerful or
| niche, like the ThreadProfile workbench or the guitar
| workbench -- and it has never bothered the highly technical
| community of users much to unify things.
|
| They weren't really trying to make a major competitor to
| commercial CAD: they were trying to have the tools that
| they individually needed and collaborate on the problems
| they had in common.
|
| The balance has markedly shifted since 0.18 and now there
| _is_ that focus, and significant commercial impetus. In the
| time I have used it -- about three years on and off -- it
| has clearly become more of a focus to make a complete
| product.
|
| ETA: there is no doubt that one of the major things that
| needs to be resolved is the duality between Part workbench
| and Part Design workbench flows.
|
| There appear to be some discussions about this -- about how
| to either merge them or create a new, future workflow that
| makes better use of them.
|
| The crux of it has always been that a section of the
| community thinks the Part Design feature-oriented flow is a
| bit of a crutch, being as it is implemented as a set of
| implicit booleans on top of the basic flow.
|
| Part Design is more fun to use for a beginner, but it is
| definitely not faster, and one of the real problems is that
| once you are in the feature flow you are kind of stuck in
| it -- it's possible to merge in objects made in the Part
| flow but only in relatively basic ways (starting a PD body
| with a "base feature", or fusing the PD body with the non-
| PD stuff at the end).
|
| I would expect future development to look at this much more
| seriously, but there was and is no point in getting into it
| in more depth until the major TNP issues are truly behind
| FreeCAD, because a feature-oriented flow especially relies
| on there not being problems there.
| justinclift wrote:
| For anyone else wondering, TNP seems to mean "Topological
| naming problem":
|
| https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem
| dbcurtis wrote:
| Yeah. I have tried and quit a number times. Poor stability has
| always made it unusable for me. Hopefully this time is better.
| Still, once I can successfully make a drawing, then what? What
| exists for CAM posts?
| jononor wrote:
| The CAM module is called Path, an you can find a list of the
| post processors included here:
| https://wiki.freecad.org/CAM_Post
|
| I have milled some basic things using the FreeCAD CAM on a
| ShopBot 2416 and small custom grbl based CNC. Many years ago
| now, but things generally look better now. Otherwise I have
| exported geometry and used external CAM software like VCarve
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| It was called Path -- in 1.x it has been renamed to CAM,
| which is a much more sensible name.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| That is our current main issue with FreeCAD, we have to
| manually create fully dimensioned drawings for our sheet
| metal shops, and they pull it into whatever they use. Can't
| just give them a drawing file, CAM export, etc.
| shadowpho wrote:
| It's usable now. I've been playing with it on and off and it's
| night and day to what it was before
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > night and day to what it was before
|
| This reminds me of iirc KiCAD 5 to KiCAD 6. Overnight it went
| from some weird clearly-Linux program to become a viable
| product, an excellent one even.
|
| KiCAD uses FreeCAD on the backend for things.
|
| I'd love to see FreeCAD take the same path!!!
|
| However... when I looked at it last year the "let's draw a
| cup" tutorial was so pathetically bad I closed it and went
| right back to solidworks without a second thought.
| crote wrote:
| I think a lot of that is a Cathedral vs. Bazaar problem.
|
| Programmers like to work on problems which are
| technologically interesting, and they _love_ adding new
| features. Dealing with technical debt and solving UX /UI
| issues isn't as much fun, so in a Bazaar model they'll
| simply _not do it_. The result is a product which feature-
| wise is very powerful, but UX-wise an absolute nightmare to
| use.
|
| But when there's a party genuinely interested in the
| product as a whole, they can push more Cathedral-like UX-
| focused development. Have a handful of devs focus on UI
| stuff for a year or two, and it has suddenly turned into a
| world-class product. Blender and KiCad have gone through
| this before, and it seems like Ondsel is pushing something
| similar for FreeCAD. Let's hope it works!
| systems_glitch wrote:
| The changes from KiCAD 3 => 4 got me to finally switch off
| EAGLE CAD, for which I had a $1600 license, but could see
| the looming subscription nonsense coming with Autodesk's
| interest in EAGLE. IIRC that was the first release after
| CERN took on development and had been dogfooding it. Every
| release since then has been a major improvement, and we've
| converted several customers from Altium to KiCAD in that
| time.
|
| I can make FreeCAD go, but we still have to manually create
| dimensioned printsets for our sheet metal shops, rather
| than just being able to hand off a drawing file. I feel
| like when we get to the point of just being able to hand
| off a drawing file, it'll be in a much better place.
| imtringued wrote:
| It is not. There are still ridiculous hoops you have to jump
| through to orient your sketch. The first thing I do is draw
| an arrow that points up in the sketch and then reorient the
| sketch. The reason for this is that the attachment editor
| just randomly picks a "random" orientation based on the
| "orientation" of the face or datum plane you are using. The
| attachment editor is fundamentally broken and needs a
| complete revamp.
|
| The other part is that FreeCAD is still this "enter numbers
| by hand and hope for the best" CAD tool. When you perform an
| extrusion, there are no visual arrows to pull the extrusion
| along. When you do a pocket and it goes in the wrong
| direction you just see nothing, instead of a transparent
| preview of the operation that is being attempted.
|
| I say this as someone who built a design in the Assembly 4
| workbench using dozens of individual parts and probably
| redesigned every part at least twice. Sure the official
| assembly workbench is a good idea in the very long run, but
| they fixed none of the short term pain points I have. You
| know, things you run into every single damn day. Meanwhile
| migrating to the new assembly workbench will cost me even
| more time. I.e. there are switching costs but hardly any
| benefits.
| jstanley wrote:
| I tend not to use the assembly workbenches, I just manually
| position separate bodies in space at the position and
| orientation I want them.
|
| You can use "LinkGroup" to group a bunch of them together
| so that they move as one unit.
| ortsa wrote:
| Blender's got a constraint solver for IK, right? How much
| spaghetti code do we need to add to give it a full CAD kernel?
| It already does everything else!
|
| I've honestly wished I could use it to make vector graphics
| sometimes, but that also needs some of the basic elements of
| CAD (parallel edges, radius constraints etc). It's so close to
| parametric modeling too, with the mesh modifiers, drivers, and
| now geo-nodes.
|
| Of course, I believe there are a few CAD plugins, but I've
| never used them, so I can't speak to their efficacy.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| While similar at a glance, the underlying functionality
| between a 3d modeler and a CAD kernel is tragically
| completely different.
|
| Even FreeCAD has some fundamental differences (and lack of
| functionality) between it and other mainline CAD programs.
|
| Hopefully someone with more knowledge and experience than me
| can hop in and explain more, I'm just a CAD user, not a CAD
| kernel developer.
| bschwindHN wrote:
| I'm not an expert either, but it could be compared to
| bitmap graphics vs. vector graphics.
|
| 3D modelers like blender (or even OpenSCAD) work with a
| bunch of triangles - there is often not some higher level
| representation of the geometry. You could put a drill hole
| in a part, but it ends up as just a ton of triangles that
| approximate that drill hole, vs. a file format which
| semantically encodes "there is a cylindrical drill hole at
| this location, with this vector direction, and this
| radius".
|
| That's what things like BRep (Boundary Representation) and
| STEP files give you is that semantic data which describes
| the part "here are the edges, faces, dimensions, etc.", vs.
| "here's a bunch of triangles, good luck machining this"
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| > but it could be compared to bitmap graphics vs. vector
| graphics.
|
| This is very much how I internally understand it and
| explain it to people, yes!
|
| It is a good analogy for e.g. why it's often a challenge
| to get something milled with a CNC when you only have an
| STL file.
|
| STL is like a PNG line drawing: it can be high quality,
| but it's not describing the drawing. STEP is like SVG:
| it's more effort to render it, but it contains the
| instructions to draw it.
| justinclift wrote:
| There's a bit more to it than that. There's an underlying
| library which can support solid modelling, but Blender has
| (or had) such an outdated version that it just wasn't
| possible.
|
| Back in 2020 someone submitted code to get it working, in
| order to make solid modelling possible:
|
| https://archive.blender.org/developer/D6807
|
| Unfortunately it looks like no official Blender developer
| ever took the time to review it, let alone merge it.
|
| Super unfortunate, as it was only about 15 lines changed.
| Probably would have needed at least one revision though, as
| one of the changes was just commenting out some lines. That'd
| likely have needed to be a better conditional instead.
| zevv wrote:
| There is the excellent CAD sketcher plugin for Blender; this
| adds a basic 2D parametric/constraint based editor into your
| workflow, which can convert it's output into a mesh to
| integrate into your blender model. For more complicated
| models I typically make 2 or 3 2D constraint models, and use
| the blender boolean tools to combine this into the final 3D
| model.
|
| https://www.cadsketcher.com/
| noncoml wrote:
| I have exactly the same experience here. You can see that the
| software has tremendous potential with a lot of work put into
| it, but the UX still sucks balls. Using the mouse to select the
| element you want is finicky the best. It takes me 5x the time
| to do the same thing vs fusion or solidworks.
|
| Then there are smaller frustrations like this confusion between
| "Part workbench" and "Part design workbench" and unhelpful
| python errors when you try to do something. But I am sure these
| will be fixed sooner or later. I think once the UX gets an
| overhaul it will be 90% there!
| observationist wrote:
| Definitely want to get a link back to the main site in your blog
| header - right now you have to edit the URL.
|
| Great work! Happy to see this, open and free tools make the world
| a better place.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| FreeCAD reminds me a little of the GIMP. Super powerful but
| somehow the UI is just hard to deal with.
| tylerflick wrote:
| The workflows are so much harder to remember than Gimp's
| though. I find myself running back to OpenSCAD every time I
| give it a shot.
| jopsen wrote:
| For simple stuff I've been pleasantly surprised by dune3d:
|
| https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d
| derekp7 wrote:
| OpenSCAD's main problem is when you get to code of any
| complexity. I'm ok with the language itself (it looks
| procedural but is really somewhat declarative), but I keep
| hitting up against a brick wall with the CSG processing.
|
| Note, however that their nightly builds are much faster, if
| you enable Manifold (a replacement CSG library that is much
| faster). In fact, a current design I'm working on wouldn't be
| possible if I hadn't switched to their nightly builds.
| leros wrote:
| From what I hear of FreeCAD, it sounds like it's going to be
| awesome and widely used, but not for 5-10 years. Anyone have
| enough experience to back that up?
|
| I'm personally using Fusion 360 and OpenSCAD.
| LtWorf wrote:
| It works, I 3d print my board games with it.
| jdevy wrote:
| I have 100s of hours of FreeCAD experience from my day job
| designing injection molded parts for toys.
|
| For some background, for about ~3-4 years (~5 years ago) I
| started using FreeCAD 1.18.1 in my job (and even more before
| that for hobby use). I am used to using open-source software
| with bad UI, so that's not my major complaint. As long as you
| stick mostly in the Part Design, Part, and TechDraw
| workbenches, you should get used to the UI. I used the main
| branch of FreeCAD up until 1.19.1 but then switched to
| RealThunder's LinkBranch [2]. I switched for the topological
| naming fixes (some introduced in this 1.0), assembly workbench
| (not the same as in this 1.0), and other many quality of life
| fixes (multiple solids per body and 3D offsets for most Part
| Design boolean operations). It was never great but it got the
| job done. As long as you never need complex organic 3D
| surfaces, FreeCAD can work - or at least the LinkBranch did for
| me, I'll have to test 1.0.
|
| However, my biggest complaint is with the CAD engine FreeCAD
| uses: OpenCASCADE (OCCT) [1]. As with most CAD engines, this
| thing is OLD. It does not like to make NURBS surfaces with true
| tangency to other faces, and it really doesn't like when
| fillits cross edges into other faces. You will spend hours
| adjusting cosmetic geometry so that dress up features like
| fillits and chamfers will apply. Unless some group of PhDs with
| some hardcore C/C++ experience come along or the company that
| develops OCCT gets some major funding, I don't think FreeCAD
| will improve enough for day-to-day design of complex parts for
| a long time.
|
| Nowadays, I use Fusion 360. I prefer SolidWorks but Fusion is
| all my job offers me currently. For a CAD package, and coming
| from years of FreeCAD, Fusion 360 just works. I have tools for
| making arbitrary complex surfaces (could still be better), I
| can create fillets that cross into other faces (most of the
| time), and I can go back in history and edit features and my
| model will rebuild itself (to a limit, but even the FreeCAD
| LinkBranch had more issues than Fusion even though it was
| better than vanilla 1.19.1 and 1.20 FreeCAD). Fusion also has a
| proper assembly system, which is essential! You can cheat and
| create parts in FreeCAD by linking sketches to geometry in
| other parts, but it can only get you so far before you need to
| go back in time and everything breaks upon a rebuild.
|
| I hate to say it, but FreeCAD has a lot of work to do other
| than the UI. I want to use FreeCAD but it wastes too much of my
| time for professional work. I would still use it for simple
| hobby projects.
|
| I could talk for hours on this stuff.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Open-Cascade-SAS/OCCT
|
| [2] https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases
| leros wrote:
| I've heard people compare FreeCAD to KiCad (a PCB design
| tool). KiCad has been usable for a long time but it's only
| recently gotten good enough where you might choose to use it
| over the other choices because it's so good. I've heard
| FreeCad still has a ways to go before you might choose it
| over Fusion or something like that.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I can't believe people aren't mentioning solvespace. Basically my
| cad journey started with openscad. Which I quickly discarded for
| cadquery. Which I used for a bit. And now I use solvespace. Imo
| they all suck. Solvespace has serious issues with anything round.
| It's basically a no go to design anything that is round in it. I
| wanted to design a simple pen like structure with a slot, turned
| out to be impossible. Perhaps I'll get so annoyed I go back to
| cadquery...
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Have you considered, perhaps, trying the FreeCAD 1.0 release
| candidate? It should be very quick to make this. Part Design ->
| sketch -> draw your pen shape -> revolution to make it round;
| then sketch -> pocket to make the slot.
| hantusk wrote:
| Check out build123d, which has a nicer api for cadquery. I draw
| sketches in svg if the sketch shapes become too unmanagable to
| express in code
| bvrmn wrote:
| +++ for build123d. Just finished TTT tutorial models and it was
| quite fun. There are some issues with non-regular fillets and
| 3d offsets but they are minor comparing to FreeCad crashes.
| Build123d algebra mode is fantastic, especially after your find
| out how to compose faces from custom line chains. Documentation
| is good, though many tricks how to get non-trivial tangent
| points could be found only in examples.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Super stoked for this, used to a mechanical engineer and I mainly
| use solidworks maker or fusion 360 to scratch my itch when I
| design stuff around the household. As "old school" as the UI is,
| it has a lot of parallel with catia v5. It's kinda like
| vim/emacs, you don't get it until you do.
| gerdesj wrote:
| I once had to deliver multiple DB Catia environments to
| multiple groups of designers's PCs. We used a chained series of
| Novell (as was) Zenworks apps (bundles these days). The
| environments are largely defined through env vars.
|
| So, an app to deliver the various versions of the code,
| followed by an app to set the env vars for the job in hand,
| followed by an app to tweak, say drive letters and other things
| and finally another one to start the interface. All of that lot
| is defined within a GUI. You could capture the env vars through
| a "snapshot" - basically a diff. from before and after an
| application installation on a test machine. Nowadays you'd
| probably use Ansible and a lot of guesswork and farting around.
|
| I'm a sysadmin but I have been trying to get to grips with
| FreeCAD for years. Mind you, I once got my parents to buy me a
| 80287 maths co-pro. so I could run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD 2(?)
| I gather that the FreeCAD kernel can now deal with a lot of
| weird stuff and not go mad when you make ill-advised
| constraints.
|
| As for emacs/vim - not for me mate! I compiled emacs on a
| Pentium II and decided against it after a while. I tolerate vim
| because it is ubiquitous, but then so is dandruff.
| syntaxing wrote:
| Yup, a lot of things show when you use software that was
| first released from 1998. The first company I worked for that
| used catia has about 10 seats. A special sysadmin we hired
| that specialized in CAD admin wrote a special powershell
| script to set everything up. He was awesome and taught me how
| to write my own vba macros. I now work for a major automaker
| and they have these precompiled binaries that does everything
| for you. It's kinda crazy to think you need a team of
| engineers to write and maintain an in house codebase just to
| make sure everything is installed correctly.
| BikeShuester wrote:
| Just wanted to share my experience with combining OpenCAD and
| some AI models for small-scale 3D printing projects. So far, it's
| been a real game-changer. The precision and accuracy have been
| impressive.
|
| Has anyone else taken this combo to the next level? I'm curious
| to know if there are any brick walls I'm not seeing yet. Are
| there limitations or challenges that come with scaling up this
| approach? Would love to hear about others' experiences with
| OpenCAD + AI in 3D printing.
| pineaux wrote:
| Show us what you made until now?
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| What is OpenCAD? Do you mean OpenSCAD? Or FreeCAD?
| justinclift wrote:
| That sounds super interesting. What's the approach you've been
| using for this?
| Always42 wrote:
| Unless you have solidworks through your job or school, FreeCAD on
| mac is the way to go.
|
| Solidworks is great until you have to buy your own license. This
| costs MULTIPLE thousands of dollars. You cannot purchase a
| "hobby" version that actually gives you the desktop version. I
| used solidworks up until my company license got pulled.
| Additionally im not a student anymore so no luck there.
|
| I used to use Fusion - but it was never as nice as solidworks. My
| student edition expired and now im out of that to.
|
| Now I use FreeCAD on Mac. Takes time to adjust and I cannot model
| as quickly, but saving $$$$
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| You can rent a non-commercial license for $99 a year. Still
| sucks because it's the usual SaaS hostage situation.
|
| They also recently raised the price of a real license by making
| you purchase a couple years of updates (which are typically
| ~worthless as a user). I was half prepared to swallow the $4k
| or so but that extra bump made me balk again.
|
| There is no moderately priced, fully featured CAD on the
| market. Unless FreeCAD has recently overhauled their UI, it is
| immensely painful to do things which are 2 clicks in
| Solidworks.
| maxerickson wrote:
| In the US, a few thousand dollars a year is moderately priced
| relative to salaries.
| rendx wrote:
| The US national median salary is $59,384 per year as of Q4
| 2023.
|
| https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/
| santoshalper wrote:
| Yeah, but probably not for someone who needs Solidworks
| for their job.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Right. How much would you pay for software that saved
| your $60,000 designer weeks per year?
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| And how many of those saved weeks are being spent
| fighting draconian licensing software? In a past life I
| had a few architectural firms as clients and actually
| getting AutoCAD licensing shit to work was a huge pain
| point.
| tverbeure wrote:
| You need to balance those _weeks_ spent fighting
| licensing issue (seriously?) against the time that 's
| lost by using a piece of software that is a nightmare to
| use... if it doesn't crash. Which it does all the time.
|
| Admittedly, it's been 2 years since I last used FreeCAD,
| but I've spent literally more than a hundred of hours
| with it trying to make it do what I wanted it to do only
| to come to the conclusion that mechanical CAD probably
| just wasn't for me.
|
| And then I tried Onshape and, surprise, it wasn't me
| after all.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Irrelevant; such a license would be purchased by the
| business and wrote off as a loss on the income/loss
| sheet.
|
| Needless to say, for a business a few or even several
| thousand dollars a year is practically nothing if it's
| critical to business operations and ensuring
| productivity.
|
| If you're buying this for your own personal use? Yeah,
| you're gonna need a lot of disposable income or some
| really good justification. For your own small business
| use? Yeah, you're gonna need to justify that cost against
| your estimated annual income and other losses.
| maxerickson wrote:
| What's irrelevant to what? The actual market for CAD
| software is well funded businesses that are buying it as
| a productivity tool, so of course their approach to the
| cost is very relevant when trying to understand the
| pricing.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The context was the cost of a Solidworks within the
| purchasing power of an average salary. Meaning the
| question posed was whether an _employee_ could buy a
| Solidworks license.
|
| To that, I say that is irrelevant because just like you
| said: It's the company that buys and pays for the
| license, not a singular employee on a salary.
| maxerickson wrote:
| You realize you are telling me what I meant?
|
| The salary of the employee provides the basis of their
| cost to the company, so any tool that increases their
| productivity for a small portion of that cost is
| something they are going to consider.
|
| I wasn't imagining that the typical person making $60k
| year would enjoy blowing thousands of dollars on a CAD
| package. This is why they aren't cheap though, because
| typical people don't buy CAD packages, companies do.
| tetromino_ wrote:
| Whose salaries, exactly? In most of the country, that's a
| couple months rent for an entire middle class family. I
| earn well, and I cannot imagine ever paying that much for
| any piece of software unless I needed it for a profit-
| making venture and the ROI was very obvious and very
| positive.
| maxerickson wrote:
| _any piece of software unless I needed it for a profit-
| making venture and the ROI was very obvious and very
| positive._
|
| Yes, that's right. Weird that a business making powerful
| software is targeting that market and not hobbyists.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Fusion was initially (and still is to some extent)
| targeted explicitly at hobbyists. At one point the CEO
| made lots of noise about his commitment to the maker
| community. 'Course since then Autodesk went from a
| company run by a maker to a company run by a marketing
| dweeb and a beancounter.
| rurban wrote:
| Sorry, but Autodesk was always run by beancounters. They
| wanted their share in office products, and went lucky
| with CAD. Read John Walkers "Autodesk Files".
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| In the context of Fusion, it was the pet project of Carl
| Bass who is very much a maker. He constantly championed
| free access for hobbyists to Fusion 360. I suspect a big
| part of his departure was due to not having any path
| towards monetizing the huge cash sink that was Fusion.
| Bass' replacement was the _chief marketing officer_.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| People that use CAD for a full time job? 2k/yr is
| basically nothing. As a business expensive it's a
| rounding error.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Right but there are people who use CAD for 3D printing
| projects around the house too. For them a few thousand a
| year is extreme.
| k1musab1 wrote:
| You should try Ondsel fork of FreeCad.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Once they release 2024.3 I probably will! They are
| definitely saying all the right things. I filled out their
| user survey and was pleased to see UI/UX at the top of the
| responses. If they start delivering meaningful UI revamp I
| will certainly send them some money - I cannot express how
| much I want a KiCAD equivalent for mechanical CAD to exist.
| starky wrote:
| Solidworks perpetual licensing has always had an annual
| maintenance fee associated with it, but they changed it a
| couple years ago where if you let your maintenance
| subscription lapse they charge you for the years you missed
| plus an additional fee. They also increased their maintenance
| prices by like 30% last year.
|
| So we are now in the process of switching to Creo which,
| while being a user experience nightmare, is so much more
| stable and runs faster than Solidworks.
|
| Agreed about FreeCAD, the user interface is terrible and even
| though Ondsel exists I just can't stand the way the program
| works. As much as I want to use FOSS software there really
| isn't much that beats the commercial products if you have
| access to them.
| justinclift wrote:
| > ... about FreeCAD, the user interface is terrible and
| even though Ondsel exists I just can't stand the way the
| program works.
|
| FreeCAD seems to operate in the same way as Catia (ie
| v5/v6), or at least have been developed to follow the same
| approach to things.
|
| Saying that as I used to use Catia years ago, so the
| FreeCAD approach wasn't completely foreign.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| It's beyond that though. How many different,
| incompatible, assembly bench plugins are there these
| days?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Ondsel helps a lot with that. FreeCAD 1.0 I think also
| now has a default Assembly bench.
| justinclift wrote:
| Yeah, the different, incompatible assembly plugins is why
| I stopped using FreeCAD a few years ago.
|
| That's reportedly been fixed (guess they picked a
| winner?), but I haven't taken a look since. I probably
| will, at some point, but I generally have a different
| focus these days.
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| They didn't pick a winner. They (Ondsel and others)
| evaluated all the workbenches, chose the best ideas and
| built a new workbench around a new (well, new to C++)
| solver.
|
| There was an Ondsel blog post about this:
|
| https://ondsel.com/blog/default-assembly-workbench-7/
| justinclift wrote:
| Thanks, that's good info. It sounds like a really optimal
| outcome. :)
| mandarax8 wrote:
| > There is no moderately priced, fully featured CAD on the
| market.
|
| BricsCAD?
| _flux wrote:
| I've been looking for a while at BricsCAD (as an
| alternative to VariCAD), but when you add in sheet metal
| folding _and ability to export and import STEP_ , it starts
| getting expensive.
|
| I just checked their site and their 20% off prices actually
| seem reasonable--at least before realizing they are yearly
| costs.. They do sell also perpetual licenses where you pay
| for the product of your selection and then a yearly
| maintenance fee, and this would perhaps make the most sense
| for a hobbyist, but this already feels a bit expensive.
|
| I've been trying to get into FreeCAD, but some of my
| existing models seem to be a bit slow with it, not to
| mention the different workflow. But I'll give 1.0 a shot!
| wakeupcall wrote:
| BricsCAD is ok. It's more of a direct modeler with
| constraint support though. It may or may not matter to
| you depending on the kind of work.
|
| I tried it for a while, and while I generally liked it,
| also got stumped by the artificial limitation of STEP
| import/export, which made it a non-starter even for hobby
| projects. This is, IMHO, the dumbest thing they could do
| in terms of licensing.
| 1jss wrote:
| Yes, I had a really hard time getting used to the UI. Later
| found the ModernUI Workbench plugin which made it a whole lot
| better. https://wiki.freecad.org/ModernUI_Workbench
|
| edit: This plugin seems unmaintained and Ondsel is probably
| the way to go now if you want a better organized UI.
| _glass wrote:
| How about https://www.plasticity.xyz/? I didn't try yet, but
| looks great.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I just picked up Plasticity earlier this week to start
| trying to learn it, it's been on my radar for a while. I've
| been using TinkerCAD for years for making my simple models,
| and it works really well for the basics but there are
| things that become painful there that Plasticity has
| promise of making a lot easier.
|
| One of the first tutorials I went through was really
| frustrating though. Some of it may be that Plasticity is a
| quickly moving target right now (lots of tutorials are for
| v0.x or 1.4, with current being v24, for an idea).
|
| A lot of the pain was this tutorial just didn't touch on
| the basics it was assuming you knew. Some of it was just
| getting used to the tool and figuring out what mode you are
| in and which you need to be in to accomplish what you need
| to do. I struggled a lot with just getting keyboard
| shortcuts and the trackpad navigation to work. I never did
| find a description of mouse/trackpad mappings (possibly
| made worse by there being ~5 themes you can select from).
|
| It shows a lot of promise, but there's going to be a bit of
| a learning curve. But there was a learning curve on
| TinkerCAD too, I just need to keep that in mind.
|
| Pricing is ok: free 30 day trial, $150 for a license with 1
| year of updates, and $299 for the Studio license. I don't
| use CAD that much, like maybe a model a month or less, so
| it's kind of a big bite to take for me personally,
| especially with it being young and likely to need to spend
| $150/year for a while here as it's revving up. The Studio
| version's xNURBS feature seems like it might be really
| enticing, but just makes that even harder for me to bite
| off.
|
| I probably should try OnShape just because they do have
| that free plan.
|
| I'm also looking at OpenSCAD for doing parameterized
| models. I installed it last night and asked Perplexity AI
| to generate a model, and it made a good start at it, but
| couldn't quite get the tongue-and-groove right.
| StillBored wrote:
| Alibre Atom3d? I too have failed at freecad, and am a
| fusion360 exile. The old school "purchase your software"
| lifetime license model and the fact that I've not needed the
| "advanced 3d modeling" feature of Design pro for my 3d
| printing/etc needs has kept me fairly happy with it. They
| have a free/hobbyist version, but I just paid them for the
| basic atom3d (when it went on sale??) a while back.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| You can get a cheap license if you're current or former
| military. (US at least)
| vlachen wrote:
| Cheap license of _what?_ SolidWorks? Fusion? OnShape?
|
| Edit: I can google that. I was just surprised that I've been
| using the stuff at work for over a decade and I am juat _now_
| hearing about it.
| lambda wrote:
| You can use OnShape for free as long as you're OK with the
| models being publicly visible. I find that fine for
| learning and personal projects.
|
| I've dabbled with OnShape, FreeCAD, and SolveSpace, and of
| them SolveSpace is the one I've ended up using the most.
| OnShape was nice, the GUI was pretty intuitive, I liked the
| way it worked, but I just feel weird trusting anything to a
| free plan on a cloud service. I don't really mind the
| public part, but it always felt tenuous that the plan would
| remain free so I didn't really feel like I could trust it
| long term.
|
| FreeCAD was complicated and opaque, I never really put in
| the time to learn it, it just felt a bit clunky, but I keep
| meaning to come back to it.
|
| SolveSpace seemed a bit mysterious at first, but just a bit
| of learning and I found myself pretty comfortable with it.
| It's not nearly as fully featured as some of the others,
| but it clicked well for me.
|
| SolveSpace and FreeCAD are both FLOSS software.
| vlachen wrote:
| I've done some FreeCAD and OpenCAD, but SolveSpace is a
| new one to me. Will scope it out.
|
| FWIW, I agree on the free platform thing. I can't bring
| myself to put my actual projects on there.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Have a look at zoo.dev too. Formerly KittyCAD.
| WillAdams wrote:
| It's the educational version of Solidworks --- did it a
| while back when my son was in high school and he found it
| useful for doing his CAD homework.
| tohnjitor wrote:
| There is now a USD$10/month subscription for Solidworks. The
| software includes an astounding amount of bloat but it does
| work.
| justinclift wrote:
| Yeah, the OSS aspect of FreeCAD is a win for sure.
|
| With Solidworks, they have things like the "Maker" edition
| which is only US$48 per year:
|
| https://www.solidworks.com/solution/3dexperience-solidworks-...
|
| I grabbed a perpetual license for the Maker edition when it
| first came out (free at the time) though I don't think I ever
| got around to really using it. ;)
| alvah wrote:
| Why "on Mac"? Is it required? I'm interested in trying out
| anything that might help to break Autodesk's monopoly, but not
| at the expense of having to use a Mac.
| progbits wrote:
| Yeah there is zero reason for mac.
|
| Freecad on Linux is great, and for commercial packages,
| onshape on chromium on Linux runs better for me than fusion
| on windows did.
| 34679 wrote:
| When I tried out FreeCAD on Ubuntu a couple years ago, it
| was an extremely frustrating experience. I was following a
| tutorial for new users until I got to a part with a simple
| instruction that involved clicking a button on the toolbar.
| The only problem was, the button wasn't there, and the
| instruction was so simple that it didn't specifically say
| "click this button at this location", it was more like "do
| this thing". It was worded in a way that made me think "it
| must be obvious and simple, why can't I figure this out?"
| After way too much time spent digging through menus, trying
| to configure the UI and searching online for a solution, I
| installed the Windows version out of frustration. The
| button was right there, front and center. The Linux version
| I had installed was just straight up missing it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| FreeCAD has come a long way since then, although it still
| has a pretty steep learning curve. Once you get the
| paradigm of it, though, it's manageable.
|
| I use it most days, and am very happy with it. Although
| I'm not an actual designer and I don't have a great deal
| of experience with other CAD software.
| fragmede wrote:
| I read it as "I have a mac and this is what's available", not
| "you should get a Mac in order to run this program".
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Probably OP's only as experience of FreeCAD and other CAD
| software on mac
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Onshape has been my cad software of choice for all my local 3d
| printing needs. It's honestly pretty damn good.
| tverbeure wrote:
| As a recovering FreeCAD user: Onshape is amazing.
| kamranjon wrote:
| Same boat. Onshape is so intuitive. What many people don't
| realize is that onshape is free as long as you don't mind
| your designs being public. All of my designs are open
| source so for me it's actually a benefit.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| This. Onshape just works. Even their sheet metal tool is
| quick and easy.
| wakeupcall wrote:
| Onshape is great. I use it as well for random things.
|
| I do expect them to do a pull-rug on the free license at some
| point, like fusion did, especially now that they've been
| bought by PTC. If they do, the commercial license is too
| expensive IMHO compared to other offerings for what they
| offer.
|
| I had the option to use the educational license at some
| point, but we couldn't get to renew it (ironically, we got a
| dirt-cheap Creo license afterwards).
|
| Just to keep things in mind it can go anyday from free to
| too-expensive.
|
| I had a few complex designs in fusion360 I essentially lost
| at some points due to the price hikes. I decided to endure
| the pain in freecad. It's getting better.
| vidanay wrote:
| My first experience with 3D was with AutoCAD 10 or 11 when they
| had "2 1/2"D. I've used ProE, Catia, Unigraphics, SolidEdge,
| Solidworks, Inventor, etc.
|
| The workflows in FreeCAD are completely irregular and alien
| compared to those others. It's incredibly frustrating to use
| and I have had zero luck becoming fluent in it.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I recommend Ondsel as well, which is free without restrictions
| (they have paid tiers that have cloud features, but those
| aren't necessary). They should include the FreeCAD 1.0 fixes in
| a few days. HUGE improvement to the FreeCAD GUI, and it saves
| in FreeCAD format so you're not stuck.
| godelski wrote:
| It's also worth noting that they work with FreeCAD and make
| pushes to them too. So using either helps both. I've been
| very happy with the developers and they are very responsive
| on GitHub.
| lazulicurio wrote:
| Just to start, I want to acknowledge that the problem space
| is tremendously complex; the FreeCAD developers have put in
| a lot of effort and it's amazing that a project like
| FreeCAD exists at all.
|
| Not trying to disrespect the other FreeCAD developers, but
| it seems like things have improved remarkably since ondsel
| started taking a more active role.
|
| The project seemed to exhibit a (common) impulse to
| prioritize extensibility too much. The "workbench"
| architecture and python API let you do some really neat
| stuff if you're willing to dig into the weeds. But, from
| the perspective of a community outsider (so take it with a
| grain of salt), the development process seemed to be a good
| example of Conway's Law in action. The workbenches let
| everyone have their own sub-projects to manage without
| stepping on each other's toes. This led to a lot of
| resulting complexities, inconsistencies, and instabilities,
| which made the approach a net negative (imo) in terms of
| tradeoffs.
|
| With ondsel, there's been more focus on holistic
| improvements and getting the individual modules working
| together more smoothly, which I greatly appreciate.
| wakeupcall wrote:
| I still recommend RealThunder's fork
| (https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/) at the moment, even
| though his fork is a bit lagging at the moment.
|
| Most of his contributions to the topology fixes got merged
| back into freecad now, but his enhancements to UI/behavior
| aren't (yet), and they make a night and day compared to
| ondsel too.
|
| I didn't find any significant limitation to RealThunder's
| assembly3.
|
| In any case, while far from most commercial offerings,
| FreeCAD is progressing and the future looks bright. I've
| stopped using f360/onshape in the last years for my hobby
| designs. Once you know the specific limitations of
| freecad+occt (something you learn in each cad program) and
| how to work them around effectively, it's already pretty
| powerful.
| hobofan wrote:
| > My student edition expired and now im out of that to.
|
| There is a "personal" version of Fusion 360 which isn't tied to
| enrollment. It has some limitations (only 10 "active"
| documents; some advanced features are locked), but overall, I
| think that's still the most accessible entry to CAD for
| hobbyist makers, especially with all the tutorials for it out
| there.
|
| I think that with the current state and trajectory of
| FreeCAD/Ondsel, they have a realistic chance of catching on.
| However if FreeCAD really wants to be the version that is
| installed (rather than Ondsel), I think they really have to get
| to a more regular release cadence.
| datavirtue wrote:
| One day these guys are going to look up and FreeCAD is going to
| be the industry standard. All because they didn't know how to
| license individuals.
| fragmede wrote:
| Why not use the hobbyist version of Fusion? it's free for non
| commercial use.
| datavirtue wrote:
| That looks very limited judging by the product page. I design
| buildings and property plans. Will this design structures in
| 3D and produce elevations and floor plans from those?
| resource_waste wrote:
| "on mac"
|
| Apple is GOAT at marketing. Incredible how much control they
| have over people.
| wickedsight wrote:
| Yeah, because nobody ever writes 'on Windows' or 'on Linux'.
| It's really only Mac users who every specify which platform
| they're recommending something about.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| What do you mean? They are just saying that their experience
| is with mac, so they recommend the mac version? If anything
| the incredible thing is that such a normal statement can
| actually be perceived as something else as soon as Apple is
| mentioned.
| slater wrote:
| Couldn't possibly be that they also make good stuff. Crazy
| talk!
| dgroshev wrote:
| SOLIDWORKS for Makers is $48/year [1]. That subscription
| includes a proper SOLIDWORKS installation, Dassault is pushing
| their web stuff, but you don't need to use it. Also, it uses
| local files by default, unlike Fusion [2]. The subscription
| comes with a no-commercial-use clause and the files can't be
| opened in the commercial version, but I'm sure if push comes to
| shove the file thing will be fixed on the high seas.
|
| Re: Mac: SOLIDWORKS runs perfectly well in Parallels on M1. I
| moved from Fusion and it's been great. Just having fully
| working G3 surfaces/constraints [3] and patterning on sketch
| points alone is worth the expense.
|
| [1] https://www.solidworks.com/solution/3dexperience-
| solidworks-...
|
| [2] Recently Autodesk changed the policy and now Fusion360 will
| remove your files if you don't pay and not log in for a year.
|
| [3] Something that I don't think we'll ever see in FreeCAD,
| considering the pace of Open CASCADE development
| https://git.dev.opencascade.org/gitweb/?p=occt.git
| tomkinstinch wrote:
| Looking forward to the day when FreeCAD is a viable and stable
| option for free parametric CAD. There are a few free options
| for direct modeling, but not for parametric design.
|
| As far as commercial software goes, my current favorite CAD
| software for hobby use is Rhino[1]. It's not parametric[2], but
| it's stable, fast[3], can import and export a wide variety of
| 3D file types, and it's pay-once-per-major-release. It's not
| cloud-based. The marketing around it seems to emphasize
| design/architecture/artistic use cases, but it also works well
| for dimensionally-accurate mechanical parts.
|
| For those eligible for a student license, the pricing is
| reasonable (cheaper still if you shop around among third-party
| edu software vendors). Surprisingly, the student license also
| allows commercial use.
|
| 1. https://www.rhino3d.com
|
| 2. Well, Rhino is not parametric in the usual sketch-based way.
| People do wild things with the Grasshopper plugin.
|
| 3. Rhino also runs on macOS, w/ hardware acceleration of
| graphics via Metal
| Nezghul wrote:
| I personally consider FreeCAD very far from stable. All I need to
| do is to open random example projects to speedrun to some
| warning/error/exception/segfault.
| declan_roberts wrote:
| I find it exceedingly frustrating to use.
|
| I knew I was in for a bad experience when I opened it up for
| the first time and I couldn't even select some components of
| the screen because the high resolution DPI monitor made some
| things unclickable because the pixel boundary box was
| impossibly small.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Does anyone have any good resources on learning FreeCAD? I didn't
| exactly find the interface approachable. Typically I use OpenSCAD
| for my basic 3D modeling needs.
| kiba wrote:
| I think the interface had improved recently.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The Hackspace folks did a series of articles and put them out
| as a PDF:
|
| https://hackspace.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad
|
| (last time I printed it, I had to add a blank to get things to
| duplex right)
| greesil wrote:
| YouTube.
|
| I make some pretty basic things to 3d print with FreeCAD and
| everything I've learned came from YouTube.
|
| Typically for me it just new part, new spreadsheet, part
| design, sketch with dimensions parameterized from spreadsheet.
| Pad or some other boolean of solids, repeat starting at new
| sketch.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I like JokoEngineering's tutorial videos:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odr5viqPwkc
|
| My first tip for most people would be to start with the Part
| Design workbench, although if you're coming from OpenSCAD, you
| might prefer the Part workbench. FreeCAD has many different
| workbenches for handling various use cases, such as
| architectural models, surface trimeshes, 2D machine shop
| drawings, and so on. The various workbenches do mostly work
| together well, but for a beginner it's intimidating to have so
| many options.
|
| "Part Design" is probably the most familiar approach for people
| coming from high-end CAD programs like SolidWorks; it uses the
| 2D sketch + extrude workflow. The similarly-named Part
| workbench is for people who prefer to think in terms of boolean
| operations on solids, which is generally the OpenSCAD way.
| infogulch wrote:
| Commenters in another thread recommend Mango Jelly tutorials.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41515552
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@MangoJellySolutions
| ragingroosevelt wrote:
| Not freecad related, but if you like programmatic cad like
| openscad, you may like cadquery even more. A lot of operations
| are way more natural and you can export step, not just stl.
| globalnode wrote:
| Also, librecad is great for 2d work, house plans, projected
| profile views etc.
| mark-r wrote:
| It's a little annoying that I couldn't find a description on
| their site of what FreeCAD actually is.
| adastra22 wrote:
| It's a free CAD software?
| mark-r wrote:
| Yes, that part's obvious just by the name. But what OS does
| it run on, or does it run in the browser? What features does
| it have?
| throwgfgfd25 wrote:
| It is C++/Qt/Python/OpenCASCADE, runs on Linux, Windows,
| Mac.
|
| Pretty low compromise in terms of portability; surprisingly
| good on Mac, has ARM support. I think on FreeBSD/OpenBSD as
| well via ports.
|
| It is a bRep GUI CAD system with 2D drafting, 3D CAD, a
| technical drawing workbench, FEM, mesh tools etc., and now
| a core CAD assembly tool. It has a "workbench" (think GUI
| plugins for specific task) approach, supports macro
| recording of Python macros, has many third-party
| workbenches, It is constraints-based and fully parametric:
| designs recompute and reflow when underlying measurements
| change.
|
| It's also a 20 year labour of love by a bunch of CAD users.
|
| If you are familiar with QGIS, it's really a lot like that
| but for CAD. It's less like GIMP than some people say, but
| it is a bit like GIMP (and like GIMP, is in a long battle
| with a core architectural problem; FreeCAD 1.0 includes a
| big victory over its worst core problem)
| kayge wrote:
| Here ya go!
|
| https://wiki.freecad.org/Frequently_asked_questions
|
| https://www.freecad.org/features.php
| dvh wrote:
| If you ever rage quitted FreeCAD then give OpenSCAD a try. It's
| completely different workflow and I love it. It perfectly clicked
| with the way I work and think.
| marmakoide wrote:
| I rage quitted OpenSCAD for FreeCAD :p
|
| For real, because I am way more productive with FreeCAD.
| FreeCAD allows to work in term of topological features like
| surfaces, edges, etc which is, in practice, very cumbersome
| with OpenSCAD.
| guitarbill wrote:
| If you like OpenSCAD but want a fillet or two and STEP export,
| Build123d is great also.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Sadly, the UX is still pants compared to Shapr3D or Fusion. Yes,
| it looks slightly better and there are improvements, but still
| very far from being enough to match either of them in terms of
| actual workflow.
|
| My biggest gripe is that it still feels like a bit of a bag of
| squirrels (changing workbenches can still lead to unpredictable
| results and importing STEP is still buggy).
| emmelaich wrote:
| Better link would not to the comments but to the page.
|
| https://blog.freecad.org/2024/09/10/the-first-release-candid...
| rubyfan wrote:
| Also this for people wanting to know more about FreeCAD.
|
| https://www.freecad.org/
|
| There was no link to the main site from the blog on mobile.
| marmakoide wrote:
| Fixing the topological naming issue, in the mainline, what a game
| changer.
|
| I am using Freecad for Actual Real Things. I learned to work
| around the topological naming issue, but it cost me time, and it
| can make parametric models quite brittle (ie. a minor change can
| break the model).
| jononor wrote:
| Yeah I am very much looking forward to that. Over the last 10
| years I have made a couple of hundreds of designs in FreeCAD
| that I have manufactured in smal scale - with FDM/SLA/SLS 3d
| printing, CO2/fiber laser, and CNC milling in
| woods/plastics/metals. So it has been plenty productive. But
| quite often doing workarounds for the topological naming
| problem, either preemptively or corrective. Maybe I will start
| to teach it again to others :)
| guerby wrote:
| Was curious about the issue, found this:
| https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem
| resource_waste wrote:
| I've completed huge projects on FreeCAD. Highly recommended.
|
| I imagine lots of complaints are either outdated, or by people
| who are used to different CAD systems and expect them to work
| exactly the same.
|
| I've tried and worked with Catia, solidworks, and fusion 360, and
| I can easily complain about each of those for being confusing.
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| I got a printer recently, tried Blender bc it was what I knew,
| then FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, CadQuery, and Build123D. The last two are
| Python frameworks built on the same OpenCascade kernal that
| powers FreeCAD, and I really reccomend them to software folks
| looking to work in version-controlled plain-text.
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