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I just tried FreeCAD last week. I uninstalled it after about 10 minutes. The most basic actions to just get started were throwing errors. Maybe it was user error, but it was a very bad first impression.
Do you mind sharing what you were trying to do? I love FreeCAD so I'd be happy to help you do it if you'd be willing to give it a second try.
I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…
take a look at https://Plasticity.xyz. It's not open-source, but it's got a small, highly dedicated team behind it. It's built on Solidworks' kernel, so it's quite robust.
Also take a look at solverspace, caligula, FreeCAD, ...
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Do you mind sharing what you were trying to do? I love FreeCAD so I'd be happy to help you do it if you'd be willing to give it a second try.
My main goal is to reproduce the floor plan of my house, so I can figure out how to best layout the furniture.
Inkscape is good for typing dimensions into rectangles tho
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Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government. Parasolid is powering practically every major CAD system. Its development started in 1986 and it's still actively developed. The amount of effort that goes into those things is immense (39 years of commercial development!) and I don't believe it can be…
> Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government. Can you help me understand why this problem is so hard?
This is already complex and fiddly enough. Just having a stable 2D drawing environment that uses a constraint solver but also behaves predictably and doesn't run into numerical instability issues is already an achievement. You don't want a spline blowing up while the user is applying constraints one by one! And yet it's trivial compared to the rest of the problem.
Having 3D features analytically (not numerically!) interacting with each other means someone needs to write code that handles the interactions. When I click on a corner and apply a G2 fillet to it, it means that there's now a new 3D surface where every section is a spline with at least 4 control points. When I then intersect that corner with a sphere, the geometric kernel must be able to analytically represent the resulting surface (intersecting that spline-profiled surface with a sphere). If I project that surface into a sketch, the kernel needs to represent its outline from an arbitrary angle — again, analytically. Naturally, there is an explosion of special cases: that sphere might either intersect the fillet, just touch it (with a single contact point), or not touch it at all, maybe after I made some edits to the earlier features.
Blender at its core is comparatively trivial. Polygons are just clumps of points, they can be operated on numerically. CAD is hell.
Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Lightroom isn't losing to Darktable; and FreeCAD isn't even in the rear view mirror of Solidworks.
I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead? Godot is rapidly gaining users/mindshare while Unity seems to be collapsing, but Unreal is still the king of game engines for now. Krita is a viable alternative for digital painting.
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Display P3 (distinct from cinema display P3, because names are hard ig) is used as a render target color space. ACES (and its internal color spaces) are designed as working spaces. If you make a color space for a display, the intent is that you can (eventually) get a display which can display all those colors. However, given the shape of the human color gamut, you can't choose three color primaries which form a trian…
no monitor uses ACES so it always needs to be converted to P3 to even see what you're doing right? or you are saying if there is some intermediate transform that makes color go beyond P3 it will get clipped? then I understand...
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During COVID I learnt Blender for 3D modelling. It is still my go to. Many people complain about it being a mesh editor but it works for me. The sheer variety of tooling and flexibility in Blender is insane, and that's before you get to the world of add-ons. I want to learn Geometry nodes and object generation as I think they will address a lot of the "parametric" crowd concerns. This v5 is meant to be a big step in…
In MCAD, “parametric” does not mean a high level part or feature is driven by editable parameters or procedurally generated features. Parametric refers to the underlying storage format representing part features in a parametric way rather than as a mesh. Mesh formats like stl cannot represent a circle by its position and radius, while a parametric format like step can. This distinction is more akin to raster (bmp) vs…
Maybe it is the export or something. I run the 3D toolbox and often models are not manifold.
I see things like two circles in slightly different positions but both are connected in different ways to the surrounding "single" instance model. Things like this mean you end up with "infinitely small volumes". There is no fully enclosed "volume" and so mathematically there is "nothing to 3D print".
As a model this makes no sense to do, and so it irks me.
But clearly the slicer software doesn't care or autocorrects and people make their 3D print happen just fine.
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The problem with FreeCAD and every other free/open source MCAD project of note is the Open Cascade kernel they are built on. While Open Cascade is fairly mature, it has dealbreaker issues in a few key areas: fillets cannot consume connected faces and may fail for a number of other reasons, cylindrical and spherical faces require seams which often cause issues with boolean operations, and shapes like helixes are also…
Sandia seems to have some form of kernel, but only Federal-associated entities can get access to it. It would be interesting to see if they would license that out further for some amount of money.
Blender is really an amazing case study of open source software. Apart from the Linux kernel and web browsers/tools, it is perhaps the only open source software that managed to beat all the commercial software in its niche. It has rendered Maya nearly obsolete. Meanwhile, in other niches, Microsoft Office still beats open source office suites like LibreOffice; Photoshop isn't about to give up its crown to GIMP; Light…
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