CAD is difficult to understand on a good day, and FreeCAD is a beginner unfriendly implementation of it.
I personally love it and it’s an excellent tool if you already know what you are doing. If you don’t, it’s a mess of screens and spaces with no rhyme or reason.
My two cents. Learn CAD first, Google Sketchup or Fusion 360 are good and beginner friendly with lots of tutorials. Then move to FreeCAD to learn the differences.
That said if you want to just try FreeCAD, this release is the best I’ve used from them.
Does it still have that weird problem where you’re not allowed to modify surfaces because of the way you created them? Last time I tried using it, I couldn’t create a mirror copy of a shape and then edit the mirror. I could only edit the source, which then applied the changes to all the parts.
The whole point of the 1.0 release is about mitigating the topological naming issue, (TNP). All 3cad program have problems with it. It can’t ever be fixed, only mitigated. You can break Fusion or SolidWorks just like FreeCad, (I’ve done it). At best the software can only fail a gracefully as possible.
I’ll mention this fix is aimed at mitigating toponaming primarily for sketch attachment. Some features still struggle with toponaming, namely chamfers and fillets. But in any case, it’s a massive step forward and makes FreeCAD much easier to recommend! Until now I’ve been using Realthunder’s fork since toponaming was such a headache to resolve manually.
FreeCAD has long had open source disease in that it is very powerful and yet a pain in the ass to work with partially through crap UI design.
1.0 includes a lot of changes that address this. They’ve modernized a lot of it, added a lot of missing features, and brought a lot of things up to modern snuff.
There are things I like about FreeCAD better than Fusion360, for example FreeCAD has a spreadsheet built into it. Fusion360, last time I used it, had a kind of underbaked Parameters list that you couldn’t even sort, the ability to have a spreadsheet for your dimensions and such.
All Parametric CAD software is complicated to use, you need to wrap your head around designing with rules, but once you get that basically all of them unlock.
CAD is a bit like programming, there’s a lot of ways to do any given task. That can make it tricky if you are doing some tutorials that use one workflow, and then start doing tutorials that use a different workflow.
If you want to learn it, do yourself a favor and take time to find a tutorial that goes from start to finish doing the type of project you want to do so you don’t get frustrated when you get midway through.
Like others said, if you are used to doing something in a different CAD software, you might find that the same workflow is clunky in FreeCAD, but if you start out with a workflow that works well in FreeCAD, you are fine.
I kinda want to try it out just as a hobby, is it decent or should I look elsewhere?
Is it decent ? Yes
Should I look elsewhere? Also yes.
CAD is difficult to understand on a good day, and FreeCAD is a beginner unfriendly implementation of it.
I personally love it and it’s an excellent tool if you already know what you are doing. If you don’t, it’s a mess of screens and spaces with no rhyme or reason.
My two cents. Learn CAD first, Google Sketchup or Fusion 360 are good and beginner friendly with lots of tutorials. Then move to FreeCAD to learn the differences.
That said if you want to just try FreeCAD, this release is the best I’ve used from them.
I’m familiar with sketchup, I’ll give it a shot this weekend!
Does it still have that weird problem where you’re not allowed to modify surfaces because of the way you created them? Last time I tried using it, I couldn’t create a mirror copy of a shape and then edit the mirror. I could only edit the source, which then applied the changes to all the parts.
The whole point of the 1.0 release is about mitigating the topological naming issue, (TNP). All 3cad program have problems with it. It can’t ever be fixed, only mitigated. You can break Fusion or SolidWorks just like FreeCad, (I’ve done it). At best the software can only fail a gracefully as possible.
I didn’t know that! From the other comment, sounds like it’s basically fixed.
They still have somethings to cleanup and tweak to make the guessing better and more reliable. But it’s on it’s way for sure.
I’ll mention this fix is aimed at mitigating toponaming primarily for sketch attachment. Some features still struggle with toponaming, namely chamfers and fillets. But in any case, it’s a massive step forward and makes FreeCAD much easier to recommend! Until now I’ve been using Realthunder’s fork since toponaming was such a headache to resolve manually.
It does but from my testing only on impossible shapes. Like two triangles mirrored at the tip with a width of 0.
It has other issues still, but the app is stable.
Nice, good to hear.
FreeCAD has long had open source disease in that it is very powerful and yet a pain in the ass to work with partially through crap UI design.
1.0 includes a lot of changes that address this. They’ve modernized a lot of it, added a lot of missing features, and brought a lot of things up to modern snuff.
There are things I like about FreeCAD better than Fusion360, for example FreeCAD has a spreadsheet built into it. Fusion360, last time I used it, had a kind of underbaked Parameters list that you couldn’t even sort, the ability to have a spreadsheet for your dimensions and such.
All Parametric CAD software is complicated to use, you need to wrap your head around designing with rules, but once you get that basically all of them unlock.
CAD is a bit like programming, there’s a lot of ways to do any given task. That can make it tricky if you are doing some tutorials that use one workflow, and then start doing tutorials that use a different workflow.
If you want to learn it, do yourself a favor and take time to find a tutorial that goes from start to finish doing the type of project you want to do so you don’t get frustrated when you get midway through.
Like others said, if you are used to doing something in a different CAD software, you might find that the same workflow is clunky in FreeCAD, but if you start out with a workflow that works well in FreeCAD, you are fine.