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FreeCAD

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191–197 of 197 posts

Re: FreeCAD

#191

Post by ezst »

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 got to use SolidWorks, Catia, Inventor before having my hands on pre-1.0 versions of FreeCAD. I never really understood the argument that it's too complex. The UI may be what it is (and admittedly full of shortcomings), but I found FreeCAD to be very conventional in the sense that you build out of sketches, define constraints that are identical from every other tool, compose those through extrusions, revolutions, etc.

The fact that it crashed on me for everything and nothing all at once seemed a bigger problem than "complexity".

Re: FreeCAD

#192

Post by weezing »

beachy wrote: post #6

I feel CAD is one area where open source does not shine. The problem space is too complex, and the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development driven from customer demands rather than developers scratching their own itches. Not least there are free (as in beer) solutions available, like fusion 360, that are enormously capable. Theres certainly a place for open source, and openscad would be a great tool to reach for…

Image manipulation doesn't shine either. GIMP is the prime example.

Re: FreeCAD

#193

Post by weezing »

erremerre wrote: post #26
beachy wrote: post #6

I feel CAD is one area where open source does not shine. The problem space is too complex, and the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development driven from customer demands rather than developers scratching their own itches. Not least there are free (as in beer) solutions available, like fusion 360, that are enormously capable. Theres certainly a place for open source, and openscad would be a great tool to reach for…

I never understood this UI problem. Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved. There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it. On the other hand, a single developer, in javascript, made a copy of photoshop, and most people I know prefer to use that over GIMP... Just copy the UI that works, if you can't research your own UI.

What's the name of said copy? Would gladly test it because I have a hard time with Linux right now due to not being able to just use Photoshop. Currently trying Krita and it's alright, because GIMP is just unusable.

Re: FreeCAD

#194

Post by ezst »

qiine wrote: post #85
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.

I kinda wish blender could just do CAD honestly, It feels like all those 3D modeling apps like 3DSmax,Fusion even Zbrush share like 90% of their feature set but your are forced to literally juggle(for videogame dev at least) because of one or two arguably extremely niche capability.

Oh gosh, please no.

Re: FreeCAD

#195

Post by ezst »

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…

You are correct in that OpenCASCADE is less refined than parasolid, but I would argue that most people just don't need it. Practically, FreeCAD is fit for all purposes, except those for which you require knowledge of what a geometric kernel even is, and then you know who you are and how to serve yourself.

Re: FreeCAD

#196

Post by fainpul »

weezing wrote: post #193
erremerre wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood this UI problem. Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved. There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it. On the other hand, a single developer, in javascript, made a copy of photoshop, and most people I know prefer to use that over GIMP... Just copy the UI that works, if you can't research your own UI.

What's the name of said copy? Would gladly test it because I have a hard time with Linux right now due to not being able to just use Photoshop. Currently trying Krita and it's alright, because GIMP is just unusable.

https://www.photopea.com/

Re: FreeCAD

#197

Post by goku12 »

luke5441 wrote: post #71
goku12 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution for Topological Naming Problem (TNP) was merged just before the 1.0 release. A lot of other significant changes were also merged in at the same time. Some people have reported that the UX has improved a lot since then. I don't know much about the internal architecture of FreeCAD. As far as I know, FreeCAD does a lot of heavy lifting including managing TNP. It's supposed to be handled by the CAD kernel -…

Not a solution, but could be one of the problems we should tell the "LLMs will replace software engineers" crowd to implement. Maybe then they'll notice that without Open Source training data it won't be able to solve the problem.

Very much with you on this!
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