I thought I would knock some dust off my drafting skills after a small chat with @[email protected]
Seeing this image on the tutorial made me realize, FreeCAD seems to be a Technical Geometry Super-Suite. It makes sense that CAD would grow to include all of these things. But I thought sharing the initial perspective of some one who hasn’t looked at this stuff in about 18 years might be interesting.
Granted I’m not actually familiar with most of this stuff, and none of it from the POV of FreeCAD. If this can deliver 10% of what I’m looking at, I’m in for a treat.
I often read that the UI is pretty unintuitive compared to the commercial competitors. I anyhow started with FreeCAD three years ago and never looked back. I design a lot of functional 3D prints with it and managed to solve all the issues I’ve faced so far. As I started with FreeCAD and never tried the alternatives, I also don’t miss the possibly more intuitive UIs 😁
I tried qcad around 2010 or so and found the UI horrible compared to autocad that I was used to. At this point in my life, drafting was pretty useless. So I had no reason to have cad unless it was free.
I found OpenScad in Y2020 and was amazed at how far it had come. It felt much more like the commercial stuff, at least to me, who was behind the times anyway.
QCad still sucks compared to AutoCAD, but it is only around $50 for a license where AutoCAD is pretty much subscription only at this point I believe.
We actually use it at work, because our 2d drafting use cases are very limited, but we still need something DWG compatible.