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Can't even take a short break from 3D designing stuff. Glad I'm switching over to FreeCAD. All I wanted was to grab some dimensions from an old model.
Check out Ondsel. It's a fork of FreeCAD with some additional features and polish.
Give Ondsel a try. It's a freecad fork. https://ondsel.com/
Ondel has a nicer user interface, but I personally use and recommend realthunder's LinkStable branch of FreeCAD. Mainline FreeCAD (and by extension, Ondsel) suffer from the topological naming problem, which can be especially jarring to users coming from proprietary CAD software. realthunder put a lot of work into a solution that handles the problem pretty well, so I'm using his fork until toponaming gets mainlined.
Ah FINALLY there is a good fork. FreeCAD exists now for like 15 years, but almost no one uses it because the ui absolutely sucks. And the worst part is, the maintainers know it but they refuse to change it because they think they're geniuses and everyone else should conform to their twisted vision of cad ui instead of following the standard of literally every other cad program out there.
IMO the bigger problem with FreeCAD is the topological naming problem. It's very easy to get frustrated because your model broke due to a change you made in an earlier feature.
The UI isn't amazing though, and that unfortunately happens quite a bit with open source software. Hopefully it'll go the way of Blender and KiCAD with an eventual major release that overhauls the UI.
This looks interesting. In your opinion, does it improve on FreeCAD much? I tried FreeCAD some time ago and I felt like an absolute moron
At this point it's a just a fork of FreeCAD with a slight UI overhaul and some usability improvements. It's still FreeCAD underneath. Ondsels product is their FreeCAD compatible collaborative cloud. They have made some changes to the workbenches to simply them and are contributing it back to main FreeCAD. But the learning curve is still there. The bugs on Windows that can crash your projects still occur. But you can use WSL to install the Linux version and not have any issues.
Why?
https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/tsarticles/ts/4GAYwrd9SV4MJlh68wUATv.html
But I don't think it works for free accounts.
I use Autodesk Inventor when at work, but I’m trying to learn FreeCAD for my own hobby project. And while I’ve had to reprogram some workflows I’m slowly getting there. What really excites me about FreeCAD is the different workbenches, such as CfdOf which gives you a nice and understandable gui for OpenFOAM, finally making CFD somewhat accessible to the masses.
There’s also a lot of new and improved functionality coming out with 0.22.
My favorite feature of FreeCAD is the spreadsheet. F360's Parameters window...it's been awhile since I've used it, but you weren't able to rearrange or sort parameters, there weren't any hotkeys or ways to quickly enter values so you had to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse a lot, plus it wasn't as multifunctional.
Had this happen to me as well this week after a few months of not using Fusion 360.
Turns out it’s a software update issue. Just close the app every time it fails, and eventually it will manage to update. I have an insanely fast internet connection, so maybe you need to keep it open for a while to download the updates.
Yeah, I'm on 1Gbps fibre and have been trying a few times. It just seemed to get an update, so hopefully that's it. Bloody annoying.
Exact same situation for me aswell... i was so happy to see that developer version of FreeCAD that completely overhauled the sketcher tool for on the fly defining
Can you tell us more about this?
i believe it's already implemented in the latest version but it was presented in the 0.21 dev version where you could start to draw a rectangle and had the boxes to contrain their lenghts automatically pop up while drawing the rectangle for example
Almost the same situation here. However, my first designs in freeCAD had lots of errors and I experienced lots of crashes and bugs. Didn't really get into it.
My tool of choice is now OpenSCAD. It does exactly what you are designing - not more, not less.
Rendering Comment Reply using CGAL...
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While OpenSCAD is amazing, it is limited in some ways. It is also very marmite-like. You either love it or hate it.
For those confused, OpenSCAD is a scripted CAD package. You effectively write code, rather than dragging the mouse around. I personally love it, but I know others who absolutely hate it for the same reasons. It depends a LOT on how you think about problems.
Don't bring the marmite into this!
But it splatters so well, when you throw it at someone I disagree with!
I might take a look - the learning curve on FreeCAD is pretty steep. Not that I wouldn't expect any other CAD to be much easier, but I feel there's a lot of assumed knowledge about concepts that appear to be unique to FreeCAD. Kinda increases the study load, if you catch my drift.
Check out the Adventures in Creation YT (or Piped) channel. He does a very exhaustive set of tutorials from beginner to advanced that is well produced and explained.
FreeCAD has an OpenSCAD plugin. Personally, I'd stick with FreeCAD regardless of workflow since you can do both in it. It has its quirks, but once you get used to it, it's great.
FreeCAD is definitely getting there. Not 100% ready for prime time, but definitely getting there.
any advice on getting constraints to actually behave? I can't seem to get it to actually create geometries more complex than a box. (and forget master-sketches. that irritates me.)
Here is a tip: constraints don't need to behave. You can leave parts unconstrained and it will still work.
You can just eyeball the placement, and make sure the constraints that matter are constrained. The rest you can leave floating freely.
Doesn’t that create wonky geometry if you try and alter the parameters?
Doesn’t thaT really scare things up later if (when) you need to make adjustments?
I’ve almost never left something unconstrained that I haven’t regretted later.
It's a little janky, but reasonably powerful.
I like FreeCAD. I know some people hate it, but I find the requirement to do things carefully and properly to avoid horrible errors later on really focusses my mind on what I'm designing. I end up with something that is probably better designed than if I could just lash something together and let the software sort out the mess.
Yeah - just teaching myself how to use it now. Cheers for the community link - wasn't subbed to that one.
