231–240 of 377 posts
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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.
What’s the consensus on the future of this type of 3D tool? Especially for video animation/CGI in movies/tv/ads? Seems like in 10 years AI will basically make it pointless to use a tool like this at least for people working on average projects. What do folks in the industry think? What’s the long term outlook?
A lot of the editing functions for 3D art play some role in achieving verisimilitude in the result - that it looks and feels believably like some source reference, in terms of shapes, materials, lights, motion and so on. For the parts of that where what you really want to say is "just configure A to be more like B", prompting and generative approaches can add a lot of value. It will be a great boost to new CG users and allow one person to feel confident in taking on more steps in the pipeline. Every 3D package today resembles an astronaut control panel because there is too much to configure and the actual productions tend to divvy up the work into specialty roles where it can become someone's job to know the way to handle a particular step.
However, the actual underlying pipeline can't be shortcut: the consistency built by traditional CG algorithms is the source of the value within CG, and still needs human attention to be directed towards some purpose. So we end up in equilibriums where the budget for a production can still go towards crafting an expensive new look, but the work itself is more targeted - decorating the interior instead of architecting the whole house.
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…
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…
I can't recall a single CAD system which did this differently. Has modern solidworks figured this out?
Graphics and animation should no longer move in the direction of perfecting the representation of real world. It is actually necessary for the graphics to scream that they are graphics and not real photos or real video. The distinction should be very obvious. This is the need of the day.
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> 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. I can think of a few more: Git obsoleted an entire category of commercial software seemingly almost overnight, VSCode has become by far the most widely used IDE (not entirely open source, though), TeX still dominates mathematical typesetting AFAIK (as it has…
TeX is arguably the only application amongst these, as opposed to tool (and that’s debatable). OSS definitely dominates in tooling, but successful open source end-user applications are rarer.
Even the qualifier "end user" application doesn't seem obvious to me. Is Photoshop an end user application or a tool for artists?
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…
> I wonder what will be the next category of open source to pull ahead? KiCad, for PCB design. They have been making massive improvements over the last few years, and with proprietary solutions shutting down (Eagle) or being unaffordable (Altium) Kicad is now by far the best option for both hobbyists and small companies. With the release of KiCad 5 in 2018 it went from being "a pain to use to, but technically suffici…
The thing I miss is being able to rotate a IC by 45 degrees.
[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/ci-cd-with-kicad-and-gitl...
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Not sure about FreeCAD but got a lot done with Gimp, Inkscape and LibreOffice in my personal projects. Totally worth my time!
I dislike using Gimp. Always have. There is just something about it that does not click with me. Just selecting a foreground object even when the background was almost white never worked for me. Just so fiddly. I can get stuff done with it.
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Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Blender has done far better than most open source software but Maya is still very much the industry standard. I don't think we can realistically say that Maya is beaten until Blender is battle-proven to the same degree, on the most demanding real-world production workloads (think Pixar/Weta), which for now it hasn't been.
Maya's API is so much better than Blender's. You pay the fee for the OS that Maya is, but the API is so much better than anything open source. Like Postgres is an OS for databases. Blender is not yet there. IIRC you need to compile entire Blender just to change a node.
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…
Microsoft Office is dying. Most grads we get only know Google docs and avoid Office. Most of our docs are on wikis or email now.
Not true of business grads - who btw are the ones who have the purchase power for enterprise wide M$ Office when they join orgs. STEM grads need to kneel and obey their purchasing decisions.
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> 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. Tbf, everything starts somewhere and all the proprietary apps you listed were not instant market leaders. I can and do use all those FOSS tools just fine both as a ho…
> I can and do use all those FOSS tools just fine both as a hobbyist and professionally, my needs are meet. Mine aren't: GIMP is okay , FreeCAD is a complete joke. It is painfully obvious that their development is done primarily by F/LOSS enthusiasts rather than by industry professionals and UX designers. They are closer to being a random collection of features than a professional workhorse. You might eventually get…
I only do occasional design for some things to print, and I'm always happy to come back to my OpenSCAD text files that I can actually read and understand within minutes, rather than having to try to remember the correct click path through some giant graphical CAD software.