I've avoided freecad because I was told it has a bit of a steep learning curve. Does anyone use it here that can talk about their experience with it? I've become pretty comfortable in Fusion360...
I've avoided freecad because I was told it has a bit of a steep learning curve. Does anyone use it here that can talk about their experience with it? I've become pretty comfortable in Fusion360 and like the sketch approach for building geometry, but I'm open to learning a different workflow, especially to break away from the AutoDesk license. I was ok with SolidWorks once upon a time but I'd be pretty rusty trying to use it now. Curious what kind of workflow FreeCAD is closer to (though I've assumed it was closer to SolidWorks)
My use cases are mostly designing for 3d printing, but I do building energy modeling and have considered looking at alternative ways of creating building geometry for model inputs. (A lot of the industry uses SketchUp as a carry over from when SketchUp was free. Admittedly I'm not a big SketchUp fan at all and do my best to avoid it unless I absolutely need to make detailed changes to model geometry.)
Really curious to learn about what the experience is like picking up FreeCAD coming from other software.
Best I've been able to tell, FreeCAD has a steep learning curve, the same way most 3D CAD software has a steep learning curve. If you plopped me down in front of Fusion360 I'd probably be just as...
Best I've been able to tell, FreeCAD has a steep learning curve, the same way most 3D CAD software has a steep learning curve. If you plopped me down in front of Fusion360 I'd probably be just as confused as when I first started going through tutorial videos for FreeCAD.
The last time I had used CAD software was about 20 years ago, until discovering FreeCAD and OpenSCAD, so I too would like to hear more from more-recent users.
I bought 3D printer and I wanted to make my own things to print. Since I'm not an artist, Blender is out of question. And because I use Linux I can't matively run Fusion 360. I tried getting it to...
I bought 3D printer and I wanted to make my own things to print. Since I'm not an artist, Blender is out of question. And because I use Linux I can't matively run Fusion 360. I tried getting it to work, but failed repeatedly and then gave up. So FreeCAD, here we go!
I wouldn't say that is has steep learning curve, but you would do best if you found someone who uses similar software (ie. Fusion 360) to show you how the process goes. Otherwise you will struggle a lot. You would struggle with F360 as well as it's not that much about the software rather about the workflow.
My FreeCAD beginning was hard, I went from wall to wall failing to do simple things or doing them in a really bad way. But I managed to make it. Then I visited my friend who showed me in F360 how to model efficiently and I returned home and tried that right away in FreeCAD. Yes, you can see it right away that F360 is superior (in user interface especially), but I found all the things I saw at my friends in F360 to be present in FreeCAD too!
FreeCAD has many tutorials online (Youtibe and its fucking ads though!) and I'm sure F360 does as well. But nothing works for me as good as half an hour with my friend in front of PC. Turotials will teac you how to do something but they won't show you the workflow.
EDIT: The workflow I speak about is using sketches. Draw a sketch on surface amd add/subtract the sketch from the model.
Try Ondsel-ES. It's just FreeCAD, but with a default configuration that works really well and an attractive theme. There's a large group of FreeCAD users that are resistant to any change at all,...
Try Ondsel-ES. It's just FreeCAD, but with a default configuration that works really well and an attractive theme.
There's a large group of FreeCAD users that are resistant to any change at all, and who consider FreeCAD's quirks features. As FreeCAD is gaining popularity, this group is getting diluted, but in the meanwhile you can jump right to good defaults by using Ondsel-ES.
Tbh I haven't found that to be the case, although maybe I'm coming at it from a different perspective? (software developer, and I maintain a fair amount of code) Customers are often very vocal +...
There's a large group of FreeCAD users that are resistant to any change at all, and who consider FreeCAD's quirks features. [...]
Tbh I haven't found that to be the case, although maybe I'm coming at it from a different perspective? (software developer, and I maintain a fair amount of code)
Customers are often very vocal + opinionated about what they want, and OSS devs are volunteers who build tools for themselves on their weekends and decide to share them with others. This relationship is fundamentally unlike buying software from Adobe, Google, or Apple: to analogize, some kind souls have dropped a box of homemade chocolate chip cookies on the community's doorstep for free. Then the community screamed into their faces about they wanted peanut butter, and threatened to patronize Autodesk Bakery instead.
I hope the FreeCAD team has been taking on more contributions (monetary, long term maintainers, etc.) recently to support all the work they've been doing. Perusing their github, a random sampling of their top contributors include a librarian, an architect, and a university student. They're doing some incredible work given the circumstances.
As a software engineer who also works on OSS, I wouldn't dream of criticizing the engineers/doc writers/translators in the community. The exact opposite actually: people second-guessing...
As a software engineer who also works on OSS, I wouldn't dream of criticizing the engineers/doc writers/translators in the community. The exact opposite actually: people second-guessing improvements, even if they are obviously improvements for 95% of the userbase, is draining for the developer and not fun at all.
Even something as simple as the new smart dimension tool has criticism. And for a long time, people have been dismissing the toponaming issues as something you just need to "get good" at, and not major flaw in the program.
I'm firmly an amateur, but I find FreeCAD to be acceptable. It has some massive usability issues in its ability to handle modifications to existing geometry that are referenced against other...
I'm firmly an amateur, but I find FreeCAD to be acceptable. It has some massive usability issues in its ability to handle modifications to existing geometry that are referenced against other geometry (see the "topological naming problem"), though, which are largely absent in Fusion 360.
Re. building energy modelling, there's a decent BIM suite built into FreeCAD, but I found that converting technical drawings to buildings with the BIM workbench felt philosophically different than the Part and Part Design workbenches: it feels a lot more like using Sketchup, albeit, with a clunkier interface.
I found FreeCAD to be really frustrating to use. I’m used to professional CAD packages like Solidworks, Fusion, NX, or Catia, and just trying out FreeCAD made me frustrated enough that I decided...
I found FreeCAD to be really frustrating to use. I’m used to professional CAD packages like Solidworks, Fusion, NX, or Catia, and just trying out FreeCAD made me frustrated enough that I decided that Autodesk’s hobbyist license bullshit was less frustrating to deal with than FreeCAD’s UX.
Neat! I personally don't really have a need for it, but from what I understand, all other options are all commercial offerings with "free" options. So having an open source player on the market...
Neat! I personally don't really have a need for it, but from what I understand, all other options are all commercial offerings with "free" options. So having an open source player on the market seems like a good thing to me.
I've avoided freecad because I was told it has a bit of a steep learning curve. Does anyone use it here that can talk about their experience with it? I've become pretty comfortable in Fusion360 and like the sketch approach for building geometry, but I'm open to learning a different workflow, especially to break away from the AutoDesk license. I was ok with SolidWorks once upon a time but I'd be pretty rusty trying to use it now. Curious what kind of workflow FreeCAD is closer to (though I've assumed it was closer to SolidWorks)
My use cases are mostly designing for 3d printing, but I do building energy modeling and have considered looking at alternative ways of creating building geometry for model inputs. (A lot of the industry uses SketchUp as a carry over from when SketchUp was free. Admittedly I'm not a big SketchUp fan at all and do my best to avoid it unless I absolutely need to make detailed changes to model geometry.)
Really curious to learn about what the experience is like picking up FreeCAD coming from other software.
Best I've been able to tell, FreeCAD has a steep learning curve, the same way most 3D CAD software has a steep learning curve. If you plopped me down in front of Fusion360 I'd probably be just as confused as when I first started going through tutorial videos for FreeCAD.
The last time I had used CAD software was about 20 years ago, until discovering FreeCAD and OpenSCAD, so I too would like to hear more from more-recent users.
I bought 3D printer and I wanted to make my own things to print. Since I'm not an artist, Blender is out of question. And because I use Linux I can't matively run Fusion 360. I tried getting it to work, but failed repeatedly and then gave up. So FreeCAD, here we go!
I wouldn't say that is has steep learning curve, but you would do best if you found someone who uses similar software (ie. Fusion 360) to show you how the process goes. Otherwise you will struggle a lot. You would struggle with F360 as well as it's not that much about the software rather about the workflow.
My FreeCAD beginning was hard, I went from wall to wall failing to do simple things or doing them in a really bad way. But I managed to make it. Then I visited my friend who showed me in F360 how to model efficiently and I returned home and tried that right away in FreeCAD. Yes, you can see it right away that F360 is superior (in user interface especially), but I found all the things I saw at my friends in F360 to be present in FreeCAD too!
FreeCAD has many tutorials online (Youtibe and its fucking ads though!) and I'm sure F360 does as well. But nothing works for me as good as half an hour with my friend in front of PC. Turotials will teac you how to do something but they won't show you the workflow.
EDIT: The workflow I speak about is using sketches. Draw a sketch on surface amd add/subtract the sketch from the model.
Try Ondsel-ES. It's just FreeCAD, but with a default configuration that works really well and an attractive theme.
There's a large group of FreeCAD users that are resistant to any change at all, and who consider FreeCAD's quirks features. As FreeCAD is gaining popularity, this group is getting diluted, but in the meanwhile you can jump right to good defaults by using Ondsel-ES.
Tbh I haven't found that to be the case, although maybe I'm coming at it from a different perspective? (software developer, and I maintain a fair amount of code)
Customers are often very vocal + opinionated about what they want, and OSS devs are volunteers who build tools for themselves on their weekends and decide to share them with others. This relationship is fundamentally unlike buying software from Adobe, Google, or Apple: to analogize, some kind souls have dropped a box of homemade chocolate chip cookies on the community's doorstep for free. Then the community screamed into their faces about they wanted peanut butter, and threatened to patronize Autodesk Bakery instead.
I hope the FreeCAD team has been taking on more contributions (monetary, long term maintainers, etc.) recently to support all the work they've been doing. Perusing their github, a random sampling of their top contributors include a librarian, an architect, and a university student. They're doing some incredible work given the circumstances.
As a software engineer who also works on OSS, I wouldn't dream of criticizing the engineers/doc writers/translators in the community. The exact opposite actually: people second-guessing improvements, even if they are obviously improvements for 95% of the userbase, is draining for the developer and not fun at all.
Even something as simple as the new smart dimension tool has criticism. And for a long time, people have been dismissing the toponaming issues as something you just need to "get good" at, and not major flaw in the program.
I'm firmly an amateur, but I find FreeCAD to be acceptable. It has some massive usability issues in its ability to handle modifications to existing geometry that are referenced against other geometry (see the "topological naming problem"), though, which are largely absent in Fusion 360.
Re. building energy modelling, there's a decent BIM suite built into FreeCAD, but I found that converting technical drawings to buildings with the BIM workbench felt philosophically different than the Part and Part Design workbenches: it feels a lot more like using Sketchup, albeit, with a clunkier interface.
I found FreeCAD to be really frustrating to use. I’m used to professional CAD packages like Solidworks, Fusion, NX, or Catia, and just trying out FreeCAD made me frustrated enough that I decided that Autodesk’s hobbyist license bullshit was less frustrating to deal with than FreeCAD’s UX.
Neat! I personally don't really have a need for it, but from what I understand, all other options are all commercial offerings with "free" options. So having an open source player on the market seems like a good thing to me.