FreeCAD: Open-source 3D parametric modeler • Hacker News Board

Re: FreeCAD: Open-source 3D parametric modeler

#71

Post by sebazzz » Sat, Feb 05, 2022, 9:54 PM UTC

nikitaga wrote: post #38

emergentstate wrote: post #2

I have pretty mixed feelings about FreeCAD, having used it for 100+ hours across a few different projects. It’s wonderful to have a open-source alternative to the expensive CAD software that muscled its way into a near monopoly in academia/industry, but it suffers from some really inexcusable design problems, on a fundamental level. As it is, I don’t think it’s really usable as a serious tool for creating complex ass…

Personally I also ran into some inexcusable bugs on my first try of FreeCAD recently. Sadly I don't have the link anymore, but the problem was offsets being incorrectly calculated in certain cases, and I found it to be a long standing bug in their issue tracker. There wasn't an easy way to work around it so I had to look elsewhere. Too bad, because FreeCAD did seem quite fine otherwise (Note: I never used SolidWorks,…

Even for simple models I've found OpenSCAD lacking. In 3d printing it is quite common to add chamfers and fillets to smooth objects. This is an extraordinarily amount of work in OpenSCAD, let alone the render times that increase significantly.

Re: FreeCAD: Open-source 3D parametric modeler

#72

Post by aothms » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 9:02 AM UTC

flaburgan wrote: post #63

I would love FreeCAD to be a viable alternative to proprietary CAD tools. I'm a web developer so I know nothing about CAD but I recently joined CERN and I'm now working on a PLM to handle our 3M+ CAD documents (yes, building the LHC is huge. And there are even bigger things coming). As you may know, CERN loves open source and it's heartbreaking to have to pay dozens of thousands of euros to have Catia, AutoCAD and Re…

Also check out BlenderBIM (I work on the umbrella organization it is part of) it has really comprehensive covering of IFC (using what they call native IFC authoring) including things as FM, hvac systems and 4D. It's fairly new so probably rough around the edges.

Regardless, invest a good deal of effort in open standards such as IFC. The proprietary tools really leave you in the dark about long term maintenance and data ownership.

Re: FreeCAD: Open-source 3D parametric modeler

#73

Post by dTal » Mon, Feb 07, 2022, 9:06 AM UTC

jackyinger wrote: post #12

phoenix3200 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found OpenSCAD to be very friendly for parametric designs, but after a while I switched to the SolidPython wrapper as it was more flexible. However, I'm hunting for a better way to create 3d models via code (Blender Python?) because 'extrude_along_path'->SolidPython->OpenSCAD->stl export simply could not handle my model.

OpenSCAD is great in some ways, but the fact that everything gets boils straight to triangles drives me nuts. If there were an OpenSCAD equivalent to work with boundary representation models I’d have found my CAD nirvana.

ZenCad?

https://mirmik.github.io/zencad/en/index.html