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Re: FreeCAD

#151

Post by ssl-3 »

sho_hn wrote: post #65
fainpul wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> extrude a pad from two intersecting shapes in a sketch You can do that in FreeCAD 1.1. Select the sketch, enable "Make Internals" in the data tab. You can also enable it permanently in settings.

This shows a general problem that FreeCAD still has: Inside an initially off-putting and frustrating UI experience is a really good application trying to get out, but at the moment a new user still has to dig it out themselves. For example, problems like this one. Or the confusing 3D navigation (switch to Gesture or TinkerCAD mode in the Settings), or the non-interactive view cube. And many other gotchas and paper cu…

I agree with you.

But there's also potential downsides to digging in and fixing the UI.

For instance: I've made a few simple boards with KiCAD. The first one was frustrating as hell and took forever, because my distro had helpfully installed the very latest version of KiCAD.

Meanwhile, the tutorials and videos were generally all about older versions. Which is fine, I guess, except way too many of them didn't even specify a version number.

So I (a complete newb) spent way too much time trying to find nonexistent UI widgets and being mystified that a given tutorial often seemed to be written by someone who was using different software entirely.

(The answer here is, of course, to have decent-enough official tutorials that stay in lock-step with software releases, so as to always get people started on the right page. But doing/enforcing that feels like work, and that's not usually what people want to feel when they volunteer to help write CAD software.)

Re: FreeCAD

#152

Post by _whiteCaps_ »

I have no formal CAD experience, I just wanted to build some stuff with my 3D printer.

If you are going to experiment with FreeCAD, I highly, highly recommend starting by learning about parametric modelling. Define everything in the spreadsheet, and relate all of the sizes to each other.

If you don't, it will be a very frustrating experience when you realize halfway into your design that some earlier piece needs to be tweaked, and your whole model falls apart.

Re: FreeCAD

#153

Post by GorbachevyChase »

kuratkull wrote: post #4

I'm a occasional hobbyist maker and i've used Autodesk Fusion, Solid Edge, OpenSCAD and other niche parametric programs, but always felt FreeCAD was too complex. But I really wanted it to work for me because it's FOSS and 100% offline. So with the new FreeCAD 1.1 RC I found an hour long tutorial and dove in. (1.1 is supposedly much easier to work with) After doing the tut I can say that 1.1 is very nice, i can uninst…

FreeCAD is one of those programs that I want to like and I’m rooting for, but for modeling outside of work I’m a much bigger fan of plasticity and blender. I’m hopeful now that language models are so good at software development that we can get a fork of freeCAD with a focus on ease of use.

Unrelated to part modeling, I would love to have a browser based roadway design tool that is domain-first, CAD second. Autodesk and Bentley are trying to be less bad, but their solutions create an extremely high administrative burden and unreasonable costs. Oh, if I just have someone working full-time for a month preparing files to be federated on your cloud platform I can finally get clash detection? I mean, shouldn’t that be table stakes for the software you are already being asked to buy over again every single year?

Re: FreeCAD

#154

Post by JKCalhoun »

phkahler wrote: post #119
JKCalhoun wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just checked it out [1] but it appears the last version released was in 2022? Makes me wonder if it is still active. [1] https://solvespace.com/index.pl

We have been very close to version 3.2 final for far too long. Development has slowed but not stopped. I would try a nightly/development build.

Thanks!

Re: FreeCAD

#155

Post by JKCalhoun »

dgroshev wrote: post #135
JKCalhoun wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I avoided Fusion (etc.) because of the usual bait-and-switch I've seen with commercial applications that claim to be "free" at some point. If I'm going to invest in learning a new application, I'd rather it be an open one. I dove into FreeCAD with either version 1.0.0 or earlier. It was… rough. To be sure, it was a whole new app so I expect initial navigation around the app to be challenging. But, wow. Nonethel…

I find SOLIDWORKS for Makers [1] a great middle ground between bait-and-switch "free" Fusion and the real, very expensive, deal. SW is one of industry standards, its interface is much better than FreeCAD's, and it's more powerful than both FreeCAD and Fusion. For example, both FreeCAD and Fusion struggle with G2/G3 smoothness [2] where SW doesn't even blink. Fusion doesn't allow to pattern features on sketch points (…

Subscription-based, cloud-based. That's two strikes.

It sounds like Solidworks is better for someone who is always using it—I maybe use a 3D CAD tool two or three weeks out of the year. Rent-anxiety (paying for it but not using it) keeps me from subscription apps.

Re: FreeCAD

#156

Post by MengerSponge »

martinpw wrote: post #130
tda wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that BREP CAD kernels are hard. A few of proprietary kernels dominate the scene: Parasolid powers NX, SolidWorks, Fusion, and Onshape, while ACIS (owned by Dassault) is used by Inventor and BricsCAD. Catia uses Dassault's own CGM kernel. The open-source world relies mostly on OpenCASCADE, which is unfortunately a lot less capable than any of these. Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They see…

> Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint. A long time ago I interviewed at one of the large CAD companies. I remember getting an office tour and the person showing me around pointed into a corner with six desks and said "that is the team that does fillets". Open source tools can handle some cases,…

Were their desks shaped like this? https://www.staples.com/bush-business-furniture-cubix-48w-co...

Re: FreeCAD

#157

Post by snug »

kuratkull wrote: post #4

I'm a occasional hobbyist maker and i've used Autodesk Fusion, Solid Edge, OpenSCAD and other niche parametric programs, but always felt FreeCAD was too complex. But I really wanted it to work for me because it's FOSS and 100% offline. So with the new FreeCAD 1.1 RC I found an hour long tutorial and dove in. (1.1 is supposedly much easier to work with) After doing the tut I can say that 1.1 is very nice, i can uninst…

I've also dove into all of those, and have mostly stuck to OpenSCAD now. I'm not amazing at it, but I've been able to get a few things done that I needed for 3D printing. What has really made much better at OpenSCAD is ClaudeCode or Antigravity in VSCode, with BSOL2 library. The documentation is just bad enough that it takes me forever to figure out on my own, but just good enough with lots of examples out there that an LLM can get mostly what I want with little fuss.

Re: FreeCAD

#158

Post by iFire »

dgroshev wrote: post #146
elaus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too feel like the latest versions are quite a big improvement and I finally lost that feeling of slowing myself down just for the sake of using OSS. But I still hope for a "blender moment" where a concerted effort gets rid of old cruft, improves UI/UX and jump-starts growth (also in developers/funding) and further improvements.

It's probably impossible for FreeCAD to catch up with the industry-standard CAD systems (SOLIDWORKS, NX, Fusion) unless they somehow pour a stupendous amount of money into their geometry kernel [1]. All major CAD systems use mature geometry kernels like Parasolid [2]. Parasolid was developed for 40 years and is still in active development. This is the piece of code that enables CAD systems to do things like computing…

As part of my donated work in Godot Engine, my approach is to improve manifold https://github.com/elalish/manifold to get a "geometric kernel"

I think I've succeeded and many CAD tools use manifold for geometric kernels on 3d boundary meshes.

I was able to get Godot Engine and Blender to adopt elalish/manifold.

List of CAD tools that adopted elalish/manifold.

OpenSCAD Blender IFCjs Nomad Sculpt Grid.Space badcad Godot Engine OCADml Flitter BRL-CAD PolygonJS Spherene Babylon.js trimesh Gypsum Valence 3D bitbybit.dev PythonOpenSCAD Conversation AnchorSCAD Dactyl Web Configurator Arcol Bento3D SKÅPA Cadova BREP.io Otterplans Bracket Engineer

Re: FreeCAD

#159

Post by mijoharas »

karotte wrote: post #148
mijoharas wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was excited about dune3d but one of the things I needed to do I had to import an SVG as a path to extrude (or similar) and I couldn't see a way to do it. I managed to do it (painfully) with freecad, so that's what I settled with. Does anyone know if that's a feature yet?

Dune 3D developer here. Use inkscape to convert the SVG path to DXF and import that.

Oh awesome, dxf import.[0] Nice, that solves it.

Gonna check out dune3d for my next side project!

[0] https://docs.dune3d.org/en/latest/dxf-import.html

Re: FreeCAD

#160

Post by obelisk79 »

imtringued wrote: post #33
Deep-States wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed: The Dune3D developers made the wise decision to start from scratch implementing a parametric modeling UI. Extremely robust software; very fast, and almost intuitive (high praise for CAD). The problem with FreeCAD, on the other hand, is that it's a "just two more weeks and it'll be great" solution. The developers are clearly talented in a raw-math kind of way, but FreeCAD offers the eternal promise of usabilit…

>Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue. If you've been around on the FreeCAD forums, you'll see that the majority of users essentially believe that all comparisons of FreeCAD with commercial CAD software is illegitimate and become incredibl…

Meh, if you gauge FreeCAD development mindset off of the forums you are misleading yourself. That was certainly the case 3 or 4 years ago, but it would seem that the core contributors have mostly moved away from the forum as a platform due to the very toxic mentality you mention. GitHub is the most concrete view into things, and a lot of free-flowing discussion happens on Discord.

The mindset against usability improvements that was prevalent back then has largely shifted. The hard part is the complexity of the program makes a single sweeping overhaul incredibly unlikely so incremental jumps and improvements will probably continue. Seems to me like things are headed in a pretty healthy direction when comparing the last few versions.

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