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Both GIMP 3 RC1 and FreeCAD 1.0 in the same month, damn
We got GIMP 3 and FreeCAD 1 before we got GTA VI
I loved the idea of FreeCAD but having no experience in CAD software at all I always struggled with fundamental basics that were not covered in the tutorials I watched. The huge amount of work benches (some of them 3rd party) did not help since most forum posts or tutorials were based on different or outdated versions.
Having a go with build123d now, trying to model stuff using python. At least the number of available API functions is manageable and everything else is just programming (which I already know).
I find the opposite. There’s so many videos on FreeCAD its wonderful. And if you’re stuck, ive posted to the forums and within a week someone literally took my file and made a video showing how to do what I couldn’t figure out.
Such a fantastic community.
If you want the best tutorials on FreeCAD, check out mangojelly on youtube. He has a current 1.0 beginner series that starts right from the very beginning. And he goes slow enough to easily follow along.
Ignore the huge number of workbenches. You can even go to the Settings and turn the ones you don’t need off so you never see them again. You are only going to use 2 workbenches 90% of the time-- Part Design and Sketcher. And as you get more experience, you might add another couple of workbenches as you go. Most of the third party workbenches are specialty things. For example, I sometimes need to design and make gears or do small sheetmetal work. So I have the Gear and sheetmetal workbenchs installed. You probably would never need it.
Learning CAD, no matter what flavor, does require effort. It’s as much about learning how to think as it is about learning how to do.
I have tried freecad a number of times to replace solidworks as a critical piece of closed source software in hardware development toolchains. I have always struggled. Yesterday someone spent an hour with me at a makespace saying… “FreeCAD has a different way of doing this/try realthunder branch/use symmetry condition/delete all conditions that coincide” … it has been worth years of trying alone. When I started solidworks the reseller gave me a week of training - this is often why complex FOSS software gets a reputation for being clunky, because alone you will spend ages hunting a GUI button in a complex interface.
TLDR: Go outside, go to makespace or a FREECAD conference - meet other people who use open source software - its much easier to use/learn from others than alone.
Well or use the forums. They have a wonderfully helpful community
I’ve tried it for a few hours, but basic stuff seems incredibly needlessly difficult. After thousands of hours in Solidworks it’s just too painful.
Oddly, despite the 1,000’s of hours of SW myself, I had little difficulty in picking up FreeCAD. Or Fusion or OnShape, (even taught OnShape to high school students), or SolidEdge. Once you understand the design process of CAD, it’s not all that hard. I do have preferences in UI’s and workflows, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use something different.
would you mind giving some examples?
Haven’t checked on FreeCAD in a while. Gonna check it out.
Does it support 3D mice?
You can even run some of them under linux with this driver: https://github.com/FreeSpacenav/spacenavd
Awesome!!
In a past career, I was a mechanical design engineer; I’ve probably spent 10,000 hours of my life in SolidWorks. Not once did I feel like a 3d mouse would speed me up or otherwise solve my problems. I trialed a spacepilot for several months and just couldn’t be arsed after awhile. What do others get out of them?
For some people it simply does not help with the workflow. For me it is a significant upgrade as it allows me to never use the normal mouse to move around in 3D, and allows me to quickly move the view to where I want it to be. Without it, moving in 3D just feels clunky to me.
But as I said, it is a preference.
I don’t have as many hours in SolidWorks but for me, trying to navigate without a 3d mouse feels like riding a bike with square tires. I could manage to do it but why. At the end of the day though it’s a preference. Likewise I have to murder the x and y axis on it for things to click in my head, which is another preference. I suppose growing up as a gamer may have something to do with that. I don’t want to move/rotate the object, I want to move/rotate the camera…
I guess Ill give it another look. Onshapes licensing is not compatible with my 3d printing side-gig, and Fusion360, although it has a very fairly priced startup license, requires me to run a Windows VM
freecad is actually getting fucking good for the price
I kinda want to try it out just as a hobby, is it decent or should I look elsewhere?
CAD is a bit like programming, there’s a lot of ways to do any given task. That can make it tricky if you are doing some tutorials that use one workflow, and then start doing tutorials that use a different workflow.
If you want to learn it, do yourself a favor and take time to find a tutorial that goes from start to finish doing the type of project you want to do so you don’t get frustrated when you get midway through.
Like others said, if you are used to doing something in a different CAD software, you might find that the same workflow is clunky in FreeCAD, but if you start out with a workflow that works well in FreeCAD, you are fine.
No. The people who struggle with FreeCAD struggle because they leaned something else first. Its the same reason Photoshop trained users complain about GIMP while people who learned GIMP first dont complain.
Learn FreeCAD first, and you won’t be handicapped
They struggle with FeeCAD for the same reason they struggle with ANY little change in software-- they simply don’t want to be bothered to learn something new. It’s called being lazy.
Is it decent ? Yes
Should I look elsewhere? Also yes.
CAD is difficult to understand on a good day, and FreeCAD is a beginner unfriendly implementation of it.
I personally love it and it’s an excellent tool if you already know what you are doing. If you don’t, it’s a mess of screens and spaces with no rhyme or reason.
My two cents. Learn CAD first, Google Sketchup or Fusion 360 are good and beginner friendly with lots of tutorials. Then move to FreeCAD to learn the differences.
That said if you want to just try FreeCAD, this release is the best I’ve used from them.
I’m familiar with sketchup, I’ll give it a shot this weekend!
Does it still have that weird problem where you’re not allowed to modify surfaces because of the way you created them? Last time I tried using it, I couldn’t create a mirror copy of a shape and then edit the mirror. I could only edit the source, which then applied the changes to all the parts.
The whole point of the 1.0 release is about mitigating the topological naming issue, (TNP). All 3cad program have problems with it. It can’t ever be fixed, only mitigated. You can break Fusion or SolidWorks just like FreeCad, (I’ve done it). At best the software can only fail a gracefully as possible.
It does but from my testing only on impossible shapes. Like two triangles mirrored at the tip with a width of 0.
It has other issues still, but the app is stable.
FreeCAD has long had open source disease in that it is very powerful and yet a pain in the ass to work with partially through crap UI design.
1.0 includes a lot of changes that address this. They’ve modernized a lot of it, added a lot of missing features, and brought a lot of things up to modern snuff.
There are things I like about FreeCAD better than Fusion360, for example FreeCAD has a spreadsheet built into it. Fusion360, last time I used it, had a kind of underbaked Parameters list that you couldn’t even sort, the ability to have a spreadsheet for your dimensions and such.
All Parametric CAD software is complicated to use, you need to wrap your head around designing with rules, but once you get that basically all of them unlock.
Apparently Ondsel recently announced they’re shutting down, partially due to this release. A lot of what Ondsel added to the FreeCAD experience is just merged into FreeCAD now. Sad to see it but at least all their work wasn’t for nothing.
Really sad to hear this, I just found out about Ondsel recently. Glad to hear FreeCAD is getting their merges, but I really would have liked to see Ondsel find a market all its own.
I had mixed feelings about the whole Ondsel thing. And, please correct me if I’m wrong.
Most of the significant features in 1.0, that supposedly came from Ondsel, are things that I’ve been using for perhaps 3 years now, with a fairly well known branch of FreeCAD called Linkstage3 by a user that goes by RealThunder.
I don’t know how much he was involved in Ondsel, or the merging of those features into FreeCAD, but it sure looked like a whole lot of great work wasn’t credited to mind boggling amount of work by one person.
I still use the Linkstage3 branch, because it has a lot more features still, than what was present in the 1.0 pre-release i tried some months ago. Maybe things have changed since then.
Ondsel’s goal was to make money by selling cloud services for CAD users. They were probably bound to fail in that endeavor-- and they did. Still, it was worth a shot. But their biggest contribution to FreeCAD was being the adult in the room and getting all the different groups to agree on how to move forward to solve the biggest problem, the TNP issue that FreeCAD had from the start and couldn’t be arsed to fix. Ondsel’s lasting contribution is the Assembly workbench that is now be the default Assembly workbench for FreeCAD. And it’s a lot better than the other 3 hacked solutions.
realthunder was involved in folding his TPN solution into this 1.0 release. Though my understanding is that it’s different than his implementation. He is now back to his fork and is supposedly cleaning up his code to work better with the mainline branch of FreeCAD to make his code easier to insert.
Personally, I would move to either the stable 1.0 release now or, I you are crazy like me, the 1.1 weekly releases-- brought to you on github every Tuesday and Saturday for your alpha enjoyment of the bleeding edge.
Me too. Ondsel wouldn’t have been possible without the massive amount of work that previously happened on FreeCAD.
If you want to be supporting FOSS, this is how you do it.
It’s also likely, consider the first paragraph of their goodbye, that it has more to do with competing in a commercial CAD space (where engineers are trained on specific software different from FreeCAD in school) than anything else.
legends
Rip Ondsel, made great changes before it died.
most of them are merged in FC, and they will still continue contributing.
Ooh! Time to give it another look.
tbh… I like it more than OnShape, but I also just use it as a hobby for 3dprinting.
It’s still… Difficult if you’re used to commercial CAD suites, but it’s leagues better than it used to be
Last time i tried it was crashing a bit. I am excited to try again, it’s such a needed tool
Seems like a lot of great changes
Glad to hear! I was using it already from time to time.
Great news
