FreeCAD
freecad.org252 points by doener 3 days ago
252 points by doener 3 days ago
MangoJelly makes great video tutorials for FreeCAD: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUWhaOxsRk_5oPPq00_Y7Dw "MangoJelly Solutions for FreeCAD"
I'm a occasional hobbyist maker and i've used Autodesk Fusion, Solid Edge, OpenSCAD and other niche parametric programs, but always felt FreeCAD was too complex. But I really wanted it to work for me because it's FOSS and 100% offline. So with the new FreeCAD 1.1 RC I found an hour long tutorial and dove in. (1.1 is supposedly much easier to work with)
After doing the tut I can say that 1.1 is very nice, i can uninstall Fusion and Solid Edge finally :)
The guide i followed, no relation to it whatsoverer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxxDahY1U6E
I switched from Fusion to FreeCAD when I bid Windows goodbye (this video inspired me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEfNRST_3x8). Fusion does a LOT of stuff for you that FreeCAD doesn't - i.e. extrude a pad from two intersecting shapes in a sketch. While this is annoying at first I feel it forces me to design smarter. I've had a few crashes and the constraint solver sometimes seems to behave weird and takes a ctrl+z and a second attempt at the same action to properly add a constraint but overall my experience has been pretty positive.
> extrude a pad from two intersecting shapes in a sketch
You can do that in FreeCAD 1.1. Select the sketch, enable "Make Internals" in the data tab. You can also enable it permanently in settings.
This shows a general problem that FreeCAD still has: Inside an initially off-putting and frustrating UI experience is a really good application trying to get out, but at the moment a new user still has to dig it out themselves.
For example, problems like this one. Or the confusing 3D navigation (switch to Gesture or TinkerCAD mode in the Settings), or the non-interactive view cube. And many other gotchas and paper cuts that can almost all be changed with a few clicks to make it more intuitive, or just more similar to popular competition (e.g. the OpenTheme add-on gets you that Fusion look you see in many FreeCAD tutorial videos).
It's a classic pattern with long-running FOSS projects. The authors get somewhat blinded to the pain because they're used to it, plus change is difficult for the established userbase. There's also a feeling that emulating competitors is surrendering one's own identity, and the idea that some of the rough edges are justified by "the powerfulness". Thus radically changing defaults, streamlining, simplifying and even just matching user expectations is often perceived as "taking the power away" and really difficult to have the daring-do to just do. Even though on the other side of the transition a much larger and happier userbase awaits.
A lot of FOSS projects eventually do mature to the point where they can pull this off, and I think there's real signs that FreeCAD is starting to get there. The upcoming 1.1 release has a ton of modern UI catch-up, such as on-canvas gizmos, and a few good defaults changes.
There's a lot more work to do, but like others I have the feeling that FreeCAD may well be approaching its Blender/KiCAD moment. I suspect becoming a contributor right now could be good fun.
I speak from experience! We've to some extent been on a similar journey with the Plasma desktop.
Well said. It seems to me, many FOSS projects suffer from long time contributors which are extremely conservative and don't like any kind of change. Hence every new or improved feature becomes merely a setting (which barely anybody will discover) which is not enabled by default. The UX does only worsen this way because old cruft coexists with its replacement, settings grow fast, the combinatorial explosion of all feature combinations produces tons of bugs and new users will always be turned off by the first use experience.
To make the necessary overhaul, someone with the "power to decide" is needed, which is somewhat incompatible with unpaid open source development. I think this video about Audacity's redesign is informative in this regard:
> To make the necessary overhaul, someone with the "power to decide" is needed,
FOSS is a doer-cracy. If you have a pain point, patch it, and it will go away.
Yeah, I avoided Fusion (etc.) because of the usual bait-and-switch I've seen with commercial applications that claim to be "free" at some point. If I'm going to invest in learning a new application, I'd rather it be an open one.
I dove into FreeCAD with either version 1.0.0 or earlier. It was… rough.
To be sure, it was a whole new app so I expect initial navigation around the app to be challenging. But, wow.
Nonetheless, I did get a few things modeled up [1]. And for that I have to thank LLMs for steering me through using the app. I suggest others to try an LLM as a guide if you are learning (and I still am learning, of course). I like tutorials, but so often you can spend hours watching tutorials that cover all manner of ground where you simply want to complete a specific task—unable to find the tutorial covering how to do it.
Having said that though, I am eager to try this 1.0.2 version. (I'm also eager to fix a few minor MacOS-specific nits that I've already seen.)
[1] https://engineersneedart.com/blog/3dprinting2025/3dprinting2...
I too feel like the latest versions are quite a big improvement and I finally lost that feeling of slowing myself down just for the sake of using OSS.
But I still hope for a "blender moment" where a concerted effort gets rid of old cruft, improves UI/UX and jump-starts growth (also in developers/funding) and further improvements.
I kinda wish blender could just do CAD honestly,
It feels like all those 3D modeling apps like 3DSmax,Fusion even Zbrush share like 90% of their feature set but your are forced to literally juggle(for videogame dev at least) because of one or two arguably extremely niche capability.
It may look like they're all easily interchangable because the UI and actions are similar (you have a viewport and can do extrudes, etc..) but fundamentally, they're all working on very different objects at their core. Blender and 3DS Max are the most alike, but Zbrush is an entirely different paradigm and so is parametric CAD. An extrude in Blender is massively different from a pad in FreeCAD.
Maybe, with a ton of time and effort the blender UI could be abstracted from most of the box-modeling approach and then pasted over a different paradigm, but It'd take tens of thousands of hours I imagine,.
Have you tried SolveSpace? It's easily my favorite open source CAD program. The main things it's missing are shells, fillets, and chamfers. But I've been able to 3D print quite a few parts using it!
Yeah I actually have. I really liked the concept, but I designed a cylinder with many holes (think a robust sieve) and it just crashed when the number of holes grew too great. Even the OpenCL/MP version. I felt it being unstable in other ways too so I did not make it my go to tool. Sadly it also seems it's not being developed much.
EDIT: Missing fillets and chamfers we're also a big problem for me - probably I'm just a newbie maker and want unreasonable things, but still.
You might want to check out Dune3D. It advertises itself as combining the constraint solver from SolveSpace with a OpenCASCADE geometry kernel supporting fillets and chamfers. :)
Haven't used it much apart from some minor tests (I tend to prefer MoI3D, but that's in a different category in several ways...), but as far as FOSS solid modelers it seems like the most promising to me. I do remember some small UI quirks, but overall it felt very approachable and streamlined, and looking at the GitHub repo, development is active. FreeCAD IMHO is just too sprawling and complex, with seemingly little tought paid to UI/UX.
Agreed: The Dune3D developers made the wise decision to start from scratch implementing a parametric modeling UI. Extremely robust software; very fast, and almost intuitive (high praise for CAD).
The problem with FreeCAD, on the other hand, is that it's a "just two more weeks and it'll be great" solution.
The developers are clearly talented in a raw-math kind of way, but FreeCAD offers the eternal promise of usability in the next release; while never delivering it.
Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.
This would perfectly explain why the FreeCAD experience is so consistently bizarre.
This. I just can’t bring myself to use FreeCAD for anything. It’s been almost a decade of occasional attempts during vacation breaks and it is still one of the worst, most counter-intuitive pieces of 3D software I’ve ever used (and I paid my way through college doing early multimedia work, some 30 years ago).
Dune3D is by the same developer as HorizonEDA, a KiCad alternative.
Has anyone tried that too?
>Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.
If you've been around on the FreeCAD forums, you'll see that the majority of users essentially believe that all comparisons of FreeCAD with commercial CAD software is illegitimate and become incredibly defensive. They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.
It's like they've got the Steve Jobs attitude but without the good taste that justified it.
>They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.
Exactly. These FreeCAD "strategies" you mention align themselves perfectly with the objectives of the legacy CAD industry: To delay; break; and obfuscate opensource CAD.
In other words: The FreeCAD team may not be infiltrated by the legacy-CAD industry, but its behavior is entirely consistent with such a state.
One solution is to fork the behemoth; but if FreeCAD is a hedge-maze-by-design, the only way to win is not to play the game: Build alternatives elsewhere, from scratch.
FreeCAD feels like a time-drainer honeypot. Though whether by accident, or malice, is unknown.
Just checked it out [1] but it appears the last version released was in 2022? Makes me wonder if it is still active.
Solvespace is nice, but missing fillets and chamfers is kind of a deal-breaker. Last time I tried it it also had issues with small holes turning into diamonds.
That said, pre-1.0 FreeCAD had a terrible UX so it was the best FOSS CAD option.
With the 1.0 release of FreeCAD the UX is much better though. There are still a few WTFs (e.g. it took me quite a while to figure out rollback is done via right-click->set tip, or something like that)... But overall it's better than Solvespace now.
I can never leave Solid Edge. Synchronous editing is simply the best for 3d printing and fast iteration when you're experimenting with designs.
Yeah I still consider Solid Edge very good. Easy to work with, does not require internet, no stupid limitations (like the 10 model limitation for Fusion). Many tutorials, etc. But still, they might revoke their free license at any moment and I am out of a tool, and wasted experience.
I think Dune 3D making constraints available in 3D space is not quite the same, but at least a bit adjacent.
This. 1.0 and 1.1 are monumental improvements over the decades of releases that came before.
I struggled through the earlier releases and now I use OnShape because I can seamlessly switch between work and personal computers. If I ever can drop that requirement I'd love to go back to FreeCAD now that it's "good".
Similar experience. I tried to learn FreeCAD a while ago. People recommended Mango Jelly's tutorials. I used those among others and dove in. However, it was a pretty frustrating experience. Things never worked quite right. I would drill into a certain point and then realized you couldn't get there from here, and had to start over.
I recently had a desperate need to 3D print a part and tried FreeCAD again. A couple of things changed: 1) 1.1 came out and 2) Mango Jelly created a playlist that essentially was "bare bones what you need to know to get started." It was slightly over an hour of the fundamentals of navigating and just enough tools.
I think FreeCAD was basically just way too buggy initially, especially on macOS. Things never worked like tutorials said, or even dot updates sometimes broke what was being taught in tutorials. Also, while great, MJ's other previous videos deep dove into specific tools. Over half of any particular video would discuss features that helped you become an expert, but overwhelming when it came to getting up and running.
Since then, I've felt much more confident about FreeCAD and have used it to knock out other pieces.
Yeah the tutorial I linked was from Mango Jelly for FreeCAD 1.1 :) He seems to have a perfect balance of getting it done, and you understanding what you are doing.
I recently gave CadQuery (a Python wrapper around OpenCASCADE) and its Jupyter and VSCode integrations another try. Two years ago installation was a mess across conda, Docker, and pyenv, and the API itself felt like a dense, bespoke DSL you had to fight.
This time everything just installed, and Claude Code turned out to be pretty good. Designing with code is sometimes more work upfront, but iteration is so much better. You get proper abstractions: functions, encapsulation, loops. You can drop in a SAT solver to optimize part placement or grab data from an excel sheet. No more clicking through a GUI that crashes and loses your session. I've spent time with Fusion, SolidWorks, NX, OnShape, FreeCAD, and Rhino, and each has its merits, but none of them can benefit from the LLM revolution the way a code-first tool can.
I asked Claude Code to generate a set of Lego bricks in various sizes, apply a nice color palette, and pack them optimally into a grid. It needed some steering, but all in all I was impressed
I believe there's a cadquery workbench for freecad, I messed around with it about a year ago but ran into similar struggles as you describe. I'll have to give it another try.
not really. cadquery started as a freecad workbench, but moved out a long while ago. So current cadquery isn't usable inside freecad (which is a shame).
also worth a look: build123d
Yeah, I found it much more interesting when it was in FreeCAD --- wish there was some nice, graphical alternative (something like Grasshopper).
I just learned about build123d from another comment here, very excited to try it out!
(I’ve posted this before on HN but it’s worth repeating)
I’m an CAD hobbyist, and I’ve tried to work with FreeCAD multiple times over past years, always failing….
…until I saw this video and learned about version 1.1:
FreeCAD is now in the same ballpark of capability and usability as Solidworks. It can still be a bit clunky and frustrating sometimes, but then so can most CAD programs, in their own ways.
Side note: the creator of the video above also has a video on optimising the FreeCAD interface. (There are some frustrations related to the interface generally, and this would seem to be a low hanging fruit for the FreeCAD team to address.)
Awesome, thanks for repeating.
I have, like, an old married couple relationship with SolidWorks. Stockholm syndrome may be more accurate. It shaped how I think, it aggravates me as only a long-time companion could, but overall I'm fond of it.
It gives me hope that others have made the switch. I've wanted to love FreeCAD for a long time, too.
I only used it for some hobby modeling, but I have to say it's fantastic and very impressive.
It seems like it's fully community-maintained, there is no big company or foundation behind it. Honestly it's hard to believe!
There was just one major problem, the infamous "topological naming problem" which caused issues downstream is you edited a non-leaf node. That was pretty frustrating to deal with, but in later releases they fixed it I think. (Have not tried it since because I didn't have anything to model)
The solution for Topological Naming Problem (TNP) was merged just before the 1.0 release. A lot of other significant changes were also merged in at the same time. Some people have reported that the UX has improved a lot since then.
I don't know much about the internal architecture of FreeCAD. As far as I know, FreeCAD does a lot of heavy lifting including managing TNP. It's supposed to be handled by the CAD kernel - OpenCASCADE in this case. I suspect that the reason why open source CAD lags behind their proprietary counterparts is really the CAD kernel. Many proprietary CAD software share the same kernel, in fact. For example, SolidWorks, Solid Edge and OnShape use Parasolid. It tells you how critical the kernel is.
Perhaps we should be focusing more on a more capable open source CAD kernel. There are a few projects around that are trying this. But they either have very limited scopes, or don't have enough support and momentum.
Not a solution, but could be one of the problems we should tell the "LLMs will replace software engineers" crowd to implement.
Maybe then they'll notice that without Open Source training data it won't be able to solve the problem.
I will try the newer version again. Last I tried 2 years or so back, it was crashing for me.
Personal Context: I am a civil enginer, and our requirement from CAD softwares are a lot simpler than Mechanical Engineering. Here on HN, whenever I see people discussing CAD, its the mechanical version of parts and 3d printing.
Shameless Plug: I have decided to try building my own! Over a long enough timeline, it is doable, including the UI/UX part.
UI/UX is not the difficult part. The hard part is the geometric modeling kernel.
Is there a reason you don't just use FreeCAD, SolveSpace, Dune3D etc instead of attempting to develop all of this from scratch given that all of this software is open source in any case?
As I said, all these are optimized for Mechanical engineering, to the best of my knowledge. In civil, there are lots of standardization in 3D part and a lot more focus on 2D side. Major part of building design is using standard steel section. Mechanical side, apart from nut bolts, everything seems to be custom. Software interfaces prioritize these use cases.
Think of I beams, all major countries have national standards of shapes and sizes. There are many "devil in detail" nuances.
So, giving it a go myself. If not for others, at least for my own itch. This is one aspect of open source.
Spent hours and hours learning how to use it to draw a part. Got it done, but then didn't use it for a long time. Next time, couldn't remember how.
Finding Cadquery less of a hurdle for casual use. Wish I could run it from Termux though.
Traditional CAD software feels vaguely like programming -- it took a _lot_ of work to understand the fundamentals.
But once I did (on commercial software), switching to Freecad really wasn't that bad.
I used it once or twice to open an existing .step file just to know if I was exporting it correctly from KiCad.
Speaking of KiCad, I am convincing lots of people to move from EAGLE to it now that EAGLE is about to be killed by AutoDesk, and everyone seem to be having a good time.
I am hoping FreeCAD can become good to the point I can convince people to move to it too.
KiCad is frustrating because it’s actually good enough to make a lot of models but it’s just unfriendly enough to make it take way too long to do… but it’s also still way easier than learning how to do it in a full-featured cad program.
I would kill for something like KiCad with more refined controls.
There's HorizonEDA. Just be prepared to spend a ridiculous amount of time setting parts up.
I can second Horizon EDA. It's not perfect, but it has the good KiCAD kernel without the abysmal UX.
FreeCAD may also be good - it's the only other one I haven't tried.
On the other hand if you're convincing EAGLE users to move they'll probably be happy with KiCAD because they're already used to an even worse UX, as if such a thing were possible.
Cadquery looks interesting. In particular STEP support compared to OpenSCAD. Thanks for mentioning.
FreeCAD is not great, it's painful to use but it's free and it works. I'm thankful for it.
I'm pretty happy with build123d these days https://github.com/gumyr/build123d
Yep. I am doing all my CAD work with build123d. I think it is much more capable than OpenSCAD due to BREP and Python. A shame that it is still relatively unknown.
A very powerful feature of FreeCAD is its Python console. It is very useful when debugging software that uses/produces 3D solids. With it I was able to:
- colorise solid faces with random colors
- colorise faces by type (cylinder, plane, etc.)
- add 3D labels in the scene
I feel CAD is one area where open source does not shine. The problem space is too complex, and the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development driven from customer demands rather than developers scratching their own itches.
Not least there are free (as in beer) solutions available, like fusion 360, that are enormously capable.
Theres certainly a place for open source, and openscad would be a great tool to reach for for procedurally generated models. But in all honesty, Freecad doesn't compare well to the professional tools in this space - not in the way that say, gimp does to its commercial competitors.
> the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development
The current AutoCAD GUI is essentially unchanged from the 80s, so this shouldn't really be much of an issue. They added a ribbon probably 15 years ago at this point, but I can't think of any other major/recent changes. (But maybe there are some changes that I'm not familiar with, since I don't use AutoCAD very often and only started using it relatively recently)
The real problem is that BREP CAD kernels are hard. A few of proprietary kernels dominate the scene: Parasolid powers NX, SolidWorks, Fusion, and Onshape, while ACIS (owned by Dassault) is used by Inventor and BricsCAD. Catia uses Dassault's own CGM kernel. The open-source world relies mostly on OpenCASCADE, which is unfortunately a lot less capable than any of these.
Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint. You can push either kernel to its limits if you try hard enough, but OCC hits that ceiling much sooner. So any CAD tool built on top of it inherits that ceiling too.
Do you think this is why CAD software UI/UX is often so clunky? The kernels are complicated and error-prone given the incalculable number of edge-cases, which puts error reporting at a disadvantage, leads to counter-intuitive feature wizards with some having way too many parameters and others being very single-purpose?
That's one of the real problems. The other real problem is an active resistance to UI improvement simply because another CAD package did something similar.
fusion 360 is exactly "free" for that reason, to make people reason like you do. They do not want a blender moment.
Note as a Linux user, the only version of Fusion you can really use is the (bad) browser one, which requires a $900/year subscription. I like Fusion, but this is a powerful motivator to make due with FreeCAD or Dune3D.
> I feel CAD is one area where open source does not shine.
Many such cases, not only in CAD area. Good non-dev FOSS software is exception, not a rule, and these exceptions pretty often have some corporate backing and are not purely community-driven. And even for dev tools there are proprietary offerings that are light-years ahead of anything FOSS, though people here are never going to admit it, as TTY clone running vi clone is supposedly all you need.
I don't state this with satisfaction, quite the opposite, but it is long since I became disillusioned.
Another advantage of OpenSCAD (if you can call it that) is that LLMs seem to be able to work with it pretty well. A few days ago I asked chatgpt to make me a box for storing batteries, and it came out perfect on first try without any modification. It also made an okay-ish looking 3D pelican after some back-and-forth.
The problem with openSCAD is that you cannot modify it easily. I had made a complex geometry several years ago in openSCAD and I have been waiting for a model that can actually convert it into a python script that generates freecad parametric sketches that recreate it in an editable way. All frontier models fail at this, some more spectacularly than others (gemini never spent 40 minutes / $4 trying and failing, but opus 4.6 did).
OpenSCAD is ideal for making models that can be modified! You have to program your models with the mindset of parametric CAD though, if I was making a battery case I would start by defining variables for battery length, diameter and count and work from there.
Your ball looks well parametrized to me, what kind of editing are you missing from it? Unless you want to change the shape of the locking mechanism altogether, which I think would be a chore in any format.
Yeah the lock is what needs iterating. It was always marginal and took several rounds of prototyping to even get to a printable state. I'd like to experiment with something like a keyed screw.
The issue with this scad file is that I built the geometry up with no functions. I tried and failed to get them working so I just pushed through, so now it is mind melting to try to refactor it. I'm hoping to one day melt a mechanical mind to get it done. Until then, it's a fun challenge prompt for these models.
I never understood this UI problem.
Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.
There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it. On the other hand, a single developer, in javascript, made a copy of photoshop, and most people I know prefer to use that over GIMP...
Just copy the UI that works, if you can't research your own UI.
I use GIMP and FreeCAD quite often and find them very powerful programs, but maybe I'm some sort of genius? I think where these programs don't do well is among the crowd who expect to be able to just click around an advanced piece of software and somehow it just works to get things done! For basic apps this is a reasonable expectation, but CAD is not a simple process.
PS: I've still not managed to learn Blender, not put enough hours in, it is a hugely complex beast of a program that basically requires keyboard shortcut use imho. That interface (beautiful as it is) has so many options that even if I know what I'm looking for I can't find it!
Part of what made Blender accessible around 2001-2002 when I was using it regularly was a really great paperback book[1] that served as a tutorial and reference. The UX was strange to be sure but after reading through the ~200 pages and getting acclimatized, it all began to feel sensible. If not for that book I would have bounced off Blender and never looked back.
[1] https://www.abebooks.com/Blender-Book-Carsten-Wartmann-Starc...
>Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.
For whatever reason, the FreeCAD community is explicitly against taking note from competitors. Copying the UI of the leader is a thoughtcrime.
Why do you think GIMP is a nightmare? I don’t find it problematic at all. The only issue I’m hitting once in a while is that I click on a button on the toolbar, and I guess I hit its edge, as I doesn’t switch modes. Other than that, I don’t have any complaints at all. What are yours?
It's mostly a received holdover opinion from the days when Gimp still defaulted to being strongly multi-windowed. The people who keep repeating it probably haven't used Gimp for a while. The usability may still not match Photoshop, but at this point the Gimp UI is largely conventional for this genre of software.
Popular opinions take ages to shift sadly.
I don’t know, I tried FreeCAD a few months ago and it was buggy as hell. I did some really basic extrusions and distance constraints. But ended up with non-perpendicular entities despite not constructing it like this.
I like freecad. I'm just not very good at using it. I rarely do sketches and part design. I end up doing stuff the kiddie way with just joining and cutting out basic shapes from the parts bench.
I’ve really enjoyed Shapr3D (built on Parasolid). Nothing particularly better than the usual competitors but the interface is really intuitive and you can realistically develop on an iPad. Curious if anyone else has had experiences with it.
I like it to. I am just not happy with how they handle model history. And it is missing many of the tooling I like from things like Fusion. A thread tool would go a long way for hobbyists.
It’s my default. It is hands down the easiest to use modern CAD software today, and I’ve tried most of them. I too use it on the iPad and Mac, wish I could get it to install under WINE.
I've crashed and burned in FreeCAD each time I've tried it (to be fair, that's happened in every other traditional 3D CAD program I've tried except Dune 3D) --- hoping that someone will update:
https://magazine.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad
for the new UI --- any word on that? (Just an annotated copy would be great)
Apparently, one of the devs from Ondsel has done a soft-fork and is stumping for funding:
(but he wasn't interested in the feature I want, see below)
That said, I managed to make it through the tutorial for Dune 3D twice now (after a fashion), and I think that the tutorial needs to do a better job of explaining concepts from first principles: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/118 and https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/252 c.f., my own attempt to explain the commercial CAD/CAM software which a company I work for sells/supports: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing --- is there a really good book which explains fundamental 3D CAD concepts and terminology?
I'm way more successful w/ OpenSCAD (usually by way of BlockSCAD: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ or https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor) and the available printed books help a lot, though I've been using the new Python integrated version:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
The thing which would really help me in FreeCAD would be having a graphical programming workbench as a first-class citizen, something like Grasshopper for Rhino3D, or the node editor in Moment of Inspiration 3D, or Dynamo as used for AutoDesk software --- any word on that?
> for the new UI --- any word on that? (Just an annotated copy would be great)
I also am not a fan of the icon-only toolbars and so I always use this plugin: https://github.com/APEbbers/FreeCAD-Ribbon
IMO it's a big improvement (I have it configured to only show small sized icons with labels) but then again I know not everyone is a fan of this type of toolbar because of the amount of screen space it takes up.
In a space that's being taken over by cloud shit where you have no privacy, FreeCAD is one of the last good CAD engineering tools left, let alone being FOSS.
Nice too see this here. I've been using FreeCAD a lot recently for various personal 3d projects.
I can't compare to any of the paid competitors as I've not used those, but in my opinion FreeCAD is slightly disappointing when it comes to UI, bugs and stability.
It's fine for simple stuff, but man, it can be frustrating to work with especially when working on something more complicated then running into random bugs or application crashes.
It's a great project though and very powerful.
FreeCad - the Dark Souls of cad software.
I really want to support open-source CAD, but it's so hard to take FreeCAD seriously. It reminds me of POV-Ray, which was (and still is) a parametric raytracer. An impressive feat of engineering completely derailed by the choice of a "UI" paradigm that made the simplest things unreasonably hard.
Designing 3D parts is hard enough, and while parametric modeling has uses... come on.
Parametric modelling is not the cause of the bad UI in FreeCAD, Fusion 360, Onshape, etc are also parametric. No, the main problems (last I tried it around 1.0) were that it had a clunky UI and that it was buggy. It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with. There were occasionally crashes. Editing previous steps would destroy the later steps much more often than in other CAD software. Etc.
I would love to go back to FreeCAD, but for now I'm using Onshape (I run Linux, so Fusion isn't an option).
> It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with.
I'm guessing you're trying to set a fillet which would completely consume one of the faces adjacent to the edge being filleted. In these cases I've found that a workaround is to make the fillet 0.001mm smaller than the size which would consume the entire face. You end up with a very very small amount of flat area but it's so small it doesn't show up during machining or 3d printing.
Usually the issue seemed to be with compound curves or where a filet tapers out as it meets up with a face going in another direction (such as a handle that sticks out).
FreeCAD relies on OpenCascade kernel to actually deal with the models, and yes, there's still room for improvement..
As I understand it, there are no other open source alternatives around. On the commercial side there are some, perhaps the foremost being the venerable Parasolid, which is used by Onshape, Solid Edge, Solid Works, Siemens NX, Shapr 3d and others.
Creating a solid 3d kernel is hard. Parasolid is from 1986.
> It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with.
These are almost all caused because they use Open Cascade under the hood
Few points that I've not seen being factored in over the past decade-
* This needs a better renderer in today's day & age
* Need cross-device/web support
* Topology Optimization w/ pure physics code
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Hopefully LLMs can work on forking this or adding better features with AI-assists
The last thing FreeCAD needs is AI integration. LLM contributions to the project have been of poor quality so far (just like most LLM contributions to FOSS)