Anyone aware of a target date for when FreeCAD 1.0 and/or Ondsel 2024.3 will be released?
Background:
I’m coming from using onshape, looking for a local opensource alt. After researching freecad (and forks) it seems if I was to start learning now, I’m in for a significant shift in workflow when 1.0 releases.
In its current state I’d lean towards ondsel.
Kind of putting off the switch till one or both implement the topo naming fix, and the other major ui changes for mainline, so I don’t need to learn two different workflows.
But I’m getting antsy and want to get learning soon.
So toponaming is already in the weekly builds of FreeCAD. My guess is they’re hoping to have v1.0 ready for their Meetup in mid August, but looking at how things have gone historically I’d make a wild guess that it’s more likely to be January or February.
Ondsel has typically jumped ahead of Main, but I have a feeling they won’t won’t with this one. This really is supposed to be the biggie that pulls FreeCAD/Ondsel close enough to some of the commercial packages to start pushing for a larger place in the pro world. Ondsel’s business model depends on it going well, as no one is gonna pay for a PDM system tied to an mCAD system with no fully supported assembly workbench, and that just gives up as soon as a user does something outside best practices.
I’ve just been using FreeCAD anyway, topo naming be damned. It hasn’t really screwed me on any of my projects once I figured it out, and I reckon that once they have that fixed it’ll just be a nice bonus. The only bugbear is that in its current state FreeCAD really wants you to design parts “its way,” whereupon if you don’t it’ll bite you in the ass later into your project. Some trial and error on my part was involved.
The things that’ll get you are attaching sketches to faces or parts of your object, and if you reconfigure your object(s) to the point that new edges are created or removed it’ll break your fillets and chamfers. There may be other caveats for people using other workbenches or doing more advanced design than I’m doing, but I have no insight into that.
For the former issue I just… don’t do that. I’ve never found a real compelling reason to attach a sketch to the geometry of another object versus just placing it separately, and for the latter you just have to do all your fillets and chamfers last, or not at all. Instead, I tend to work them into my sketches and the base geometries of my objects anyway, which is more flexible and in some cases easier (and in some cases not).
I don’t think anything significant is going to change between the current release and the next one in that regard. All your old workflows will still work, it’s not like they’re going to take any capabilities away from you.
Working around the topo naming problem isn’t that big of a deal, for the most part, once you get the hang of it - often it’s just a matter of reattaching sketches to the correct face, for example, and using parametric tables helps a lot as well.
To put it another way - I wouldn’t avoid FreeCAD/Ondsel just because of this. And if it really, really is an issue, try a 0.22 dev build of FreeCAD for the interim.
