FreeCAD

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Your own 3D parametric modeler.

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FreeCAD is an open-source parametric 3D modeler made primarily to design real-life objects of any size. Parametric modeling allows you to easily modify your design by going back into your model history and changing its parameters.

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Is freecad so difficult due to design decisions or are they technical limitations? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi! I started to fiddle around with freecad a little again tonight. I still find many things unintuitive. And I just watched a video about master sketches, because they are essential in my workflow on other programs. It makes it soo much easier to keep the overview and change little things quickly because I don't have to search for the responsible sketch.

In this video the person demonstrates at around 9:15 how to use the master sketch as a reference in the sub bodies. I can get used to only get one body from a sketch, but man, how many steps does it take to just reference a sketch?! You even need to use a differen workbech, use the clone tool, but not this one and then drag and drop the duplicate into the same body you are working on? Why?! I mean the sketch is right there, just let me click it!!

This got me wondering it those rough workflows are just designed badly or if this is a limitation of the engine or whstevery it's called, that freecad is based on? Because in my limited programming mind it does not make a difference what file is referenced. If it is some file on a directory above, just use something like "./" Before to go up one directory.

And I think those little things that just work in other cad software, makes freecad so much less approcavhabel and so much harder to jump in.

If I want to make a complicated part, that is not just a box with a hole, I don't want to Google around until I found a solution, I want the intuitive solution to work without 3 extra steps. This just hinders my design process a lot.

Maybe someone knows how freecad works on the background and can explain why freecad works like that.

Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

FreeCAD is the way it is mostly because it's not optimized by multi-billion dollar companies with teams of developers and UI/UX engineers. It's very much the do-all-the-steps-your-self CAD package.

That said, there are loads of bad or outdated video tutorials out there, and generally people tend to find one way to do a thing and then market their video as THE way to do it. Treat FreeCAD like Linux, there are lots of "correct" ways to use it, and also don't expect it to be something it's not.

If you feel comfortable with it, it would be cool for you to make a short video of where you are stuck, or where you feel you are doing unnecessary steps, and maybe we can help you reach our goal in a simpler way?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I like and use FreeCAD, but I'd have to chime in and say you don't need a multi-million dollar company to develop better UI/UX - FreeCAD has some notoriously bad workflows.

The established user base and complexity of the software probably don't exactly make a major UI overhaul easy, I'd reckon, so I would wager the problem is mostly historical, i. e. it grew without critical evaluation and now we're here.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Yeah that's fair, I do think that a big UI/UX redesign that makes it magically user friendly in a single release cycle would be next to impossible with the funding the project has though, and unfortunately a long drawn out redesign (what's currently happening with, say, RT's UI improvements) would likely have a lot of the problems that got us to this point as well. UI/UX benefits from a closely integrated team working towards a singular goal in my (limited) experience.

Now that I'm thinking about it a bit more, the project moves very slow and is for some reason extremely cautious about contributed core code so when things do need to be improved they become workbenches or addons and splinter the workflow even more.

This PR for example was a massive hurdle for some transparent overlays and went quite quickly in comparison to other features https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/7888

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

In a quick read, it sounds like the video you are referencing might be an old one. There's a lot of functionality in sketcher that is relatively new that used to be done in other workbenches. And even more in the forthcoming 0.22 release.

FreeCAD can be tricky, but once you learn a workflow that keeps things smooth, it helps a lot - and that comes with experience. And while I certainly have had to watch videos and read docs on how to do some things, I've had to do the exact same thing with commercial tools I've used. And sometimes, you just have to delete a bunch of steps and re-do them. This can be frustrating, but aside from the topology naming problem, that's really the same on the commercial products too - CAD can be frustrating. And in a lot of cases all you really need to do is go back and re-reference to work through the naming problem (such as a sketch or operation referencing a face that is now different).

In summary - it takes time and effort to learn, it's not a simple tool. Once you start to work with it, and learn to do things the way FreeCAD wants you to, it gets a lot easier and you'll be very productive.

For what it's worth, my favorite FreeCAD YouTube videos are from MangoJelly's channel. Many, many times I've been stuck on something and he will have a video on the exact thing. A recent one for me is failed fillets on curved surfaces and learning how tangency matters.

I hope this helps. It's a powerful, but complex tool, with plenty of pitfalls, but once you spend the time to work with it, it'll do what you want it to.

Oh, and one more thing - there's a commercial product Ondsel built on FreeCAD. They are contributing a lot back to FreeCAD (and I think some core FreeCAD devs are part of Ondsel). While commercially wrapped open source can be good or bad, I think this will help move things forward for FreeCAD in a positive way. I've been running Ondsel myself (it's FreeCAD at the core) as it has many 0.22 features in the current stable release.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I really want to like freecad but I have no idea how to do anything in in and tutorials drone on about useless shit like everyone has done for the last decade.

Meanwhile I needed to make a 3d printed part for work so I pulled out a laptop and made the part in onshape which I had never used before. Of course onshape has its own list of shitty stuff like owning everything you make but the point is I was able to make the part by clicking on buttons that seemed like what I wanted. Freecad had like 609 extra buttons that look like they should do what I want but they totally don't. F360 has about the same intuitive usage but signing in and license and such are irritating even if you don't have to use different computers.

Does anyone have recommended tutorial for making parts that doesn't flow like a food recipe with the life's story as an intro and melded in with the instructions?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Every CAD program has buttons for functions you may never use for the types of objects you design. A lot of commercial CAD has taken the approach of defaulting to a basic limited set of buttons that most people use. You can usually customize the interface to add any extra functionality you need. FreeCAD puts everything out there by default and you also have the option to customize to your needs. How can they possibly know what you need? As soon as they leave something out, they’ll be crucified for it. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

With respect to tutorials “droning on about useless shit”, I’ll bet there are a lot of fundamentals being explained that are critical to understanding typical CAD workflows. It’s not just FreeCAD. These same fundamentals apply to SolidWorks, Creo, Onshape, F360, etc… It’s all generally the same.

The people that I see complain about FreeCAD often say they have no experience and that it’s because FreeCAD is somehow bad. I use SolidWorks every day at work and I use FreeCAD at home. I had no trouble learning FreeCAD because the modeling methods are the same. All CAD shares some common problems that you learn to avoid by experience. However, you need to learn the basics and make some mistakes to get good at it.

Many people start with intensely complex parts and get upset when they can’t make what they want. Practice with easy parts and experiment with different methods. Often, there is more than one way to make something in CAD. Some might be better than others, but it’s situationally dependent.

Learn the basics, practice, and keep learning and you’ll be fine regardless of what CAD you use.