- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
You must log in or # to comment.
Both GIMP 3 RC1 and FreeCAD 1.0 in the same month, damn
We got GIMP 3 and FreeCAD 1 before we got GTA VI
And Inkscape 1.4!
Oh lawd, another thing to check out
freecad is actually getting fucking good for the price
Always has been.
pretty much, but its really crossing some thresholds lately which i find impressive
Ooh! Time to give it another look.
tbh… I like it more than OnShape, but I also just use it as a hobby for 3dprinting.
It’s still… Difficult if you’re used to commercial CAD suites, but it’s leagues better than it used to be
Rip Ondsel, made great changes before it died.
most of them are merged in FC, and they will still continue contributing.
I’ve tried it for a few hours, but basic stuff seems incredibly needlessly difficult. After thousands of hours in Solidworks it’s just too painful.
Oddly, despite the 1,000’s of hours of SW myself, I had little difficulty in picking up FreeCAD. Or Fusion or OnShape, (even taught OnShape to high school students), or SolidEdge. Once you understand the design process of CAD, it’s not all that hard. I do have preferences in UI’s and workflows, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use something different.
All the others you listed are very similar to solidworks and no problem. FreeCAD decided sketching should be completely different. I can barely even draw a line and I don’t understand how that’s possible.
Why does it surprise you much that FreeCAD isn’t like SW? And why do you think it should be?
Because solidworks is the gold standard in the space and is intuitive for millennials that grew up on computers. It mirrors other software that came before in terms of super basic stuff like how to draw a damn line. If you’re going to do a big swing and change the paradigm with a fundamentally better way, it better be really good for a really good reason.
You just want to be angry and complain about something don’t you. Either get over it and learn to use FreeCAD or don’t. But whinging is unproductive and useless.
would you mind giving some examples?
I just treid it a bit. And I have to say its quite incredible how good it got! Still a bit rough but I would say its 30% better than a year ago. But maybe ondsel just got me into the mindset of this program.
Its sad to see ondsel go because I doubt we would be here without them.
I hope the freecad team sees all the incredible feedback and the next few versions will be similar improvements for usabilty!
Wait, what happened to Ondsel? I’ve been using it for the last several months as it just seemed to make more sense than FreeCAD did…
Ondsel was not a profitable product as far as I understood. Which is understandable, but I think they would have needed more time and money to make freecad a real competitor over established cad tools
I loved the idea of FreeCAD but having no experience in CAD software at all I always struggled with fundamental basics that were not covered in the tutorials I watched. The huge amount of work benches (some of them 3rd party) did not help since most forum posts or tutorials were based on different or outdated versions.
Having a go with build123d now, trying to model stuff using python. At least the number of available API functions is manageable and everything else is just programming (which I already know).
If you want the best tutorials on FreeCAD, check out mangojelly on youtube. He has a current 1.0 beginner series that starts right from the very beginning. And he goes slow enough to easily follow along.
Ignore the huge number of workbenches. You can even go to the Settings and turn the ones you don’t need off so you never see them again. You are only going to use 2 workbenches 90% of the time-- Part Design and Sketcher. And as you get more experience, you might add another couple of workbenches as you go. Most of the third party workbenches are specialty things. For example, I sometimes need to design and make gears or do small sheetmetal work. So I have the Gear and sheetmetal workbenchs installed. You probably would never need it.
Learning CAD, no matter what flavor, does require effort. It’s as much about learning how to think as it is about learning how to do.
deleted by creator
Also this channel has many new videos with freecad 1.0. Especially for woodworking
I find the opposite. There’s so many videos on FreeCAD its wonderful. And if you’re stuck, ive posted to the forums and within a week someone literally took my file and made a video showing how to do what I couldn’t figure out.
Such a fantastic community.
One of the things I would do if I had control of FreeCAD would be to reduce the number of workbenches it ships with. Why does every copy come with the Robot workbench? Who is A) working with industrial robot arms and B) using FreeCAD to do so? Especially since it’s “Currently unmaintained?” there was awhile there where it also came with a “ship” workbench which could generate a container ship hull with one click. For my purposes I end up hiding the BIM, CAM, Draft, FEM, Inspection, Mesh, Points, and Surface workbenches as I never use them, and it declutters things quite nicely.
For me it’s a bit different - just installing things to get build123d to work is an insurmountable obstacle. Because I’m not a programmer it’s rage-inducing. But I guess that’s how this stuff goes 😉
Since I work with AutoCAD daily I feel like Ive been hearing about FreeCAD for what feels like a decade or two. I cant believe it has been pre 1.0 all this time.
I use LibreCAD for architecture work and will take a look at FreeCAD.
Has anyone else tried both for architectural work? How did they compare for you?
I work as an architectural designer but I’ve never really been allowed to use anything other than Revit for BIM workflows. Our consultants basically only use Revit or Autodesk products, so our hands are kind of tied for projects where we need to collaborate.
My boss uses Vectorworks for our small projects that don’t need BIM, I might suggest we switch to Libre or FreeCAD so that we all have access without needed another VW license. Do you enjoy using LibreCAD?
I like LibreCAD, but it’s a little too simple sometimes. I miss the power of AutoCAD, but I don’t miss its price.
Three things I want are
- being able to assign heights to objects and do 3D stuff
- being able to assign labels to objects (instead of circle3761 I’d like to call it ‘fountain’ or something)
- splines are really finicky, and you can’t do things like a fillet on more complex objects
It took a couple of days to get used to and probably a week of use before I was 100% comfortable, but I find that it meets most of my needs now.
I imagine both Libre and Free are open-sourced and easily modifiable? I haven’t looked into it, but if it’s anything like Rhino there should be a standard way of writing custom plugins that should close the gap on some of those - at least the object naming would be easy.
I’ll look into them though, thanks! BIM software is such a pain in the ass to work with and one of the most expensive design software I know of, I think open sourced projects would be amazing for BIM if they took off like FreeCAD did
Plz keep us update on your thoughts, progress, etc. There has very few posts on this topic.
1.0? So which one have I been using?
0.8, 0.9, etc…
0.9.final.revised.25BAK.lastbest.final
I’m just surprised that it’s so new
new is a different concept from first api stable release. it’s been in development since 2002. 0.21 was the most recent release, and the software has been pretty much usable since 2010 at least. but this 1.0 release is a big deal because it basically means any features you currently know and like can be expected to be there for forever. it’s more of a promise than a time-based release measure
Ah thanks for the explanation. That makes a lot of sense. Because using Freecad it certainly doesn’t feel new. Looks late 90s or early 2000s
when is it getting a new UI? hopefully the blender 2.8 moment will come soon for FreeCAD.
There is already OpenTheme, which you can install via the AdonManager… looks waaaay better than the default
Seems like a lot of great changes
How is it for Civil work?
Glad to hear! I was using it already from time to time.
Great news
