Can't even take a short break from 3D designing stuff. Glad I'm switching over to FreeCAD. All I wanted was to grab some dimensions from an old model.
"Thou has missed daily prayers for two whole weeks"
Almost the same situation here. However, my first designs in freeCAD had lots of errors and I experienced lots of crashes and bugs. Didn't really get into it.
My tool of choice is now OpenSCAD. It does exactly what you are designing - not more, not less.
While OpenSCAD is amazing, it is limited in some ways. It is also very marmite-like. You either love it or hate it.
For those confused, OpenSCAD is a scripted CAD package. You effectively write code, rather than dragging the mouse around. I personally love it, but I know others who absolutely hate it for the same reasons. It depends a LOT on how you think about problems.
I might take a look - the learning curve on FreeCAD is pretty steep. Not that I wouldn't expect any other CAD to be much easier, but I feel there's a lot of assumed knowledge about concepts that appear to be unique to FreeCAD. Kinda increases the study load, if you catch my drift.
FreeCAD is definitely getting there. Not 100% ready for prime time, but definitely getting there.
FreeCAD has an OpenSCAD plugin. Personally, I'd stick with FreeCAD regardless of workflow since you can do both in it. It has its quirks, but once you get used to it, it's great.
Fellow OpenSCAD user here. I'd recommend it to anyone as a thing to try, but not necessarily as a thing to certainly end up using.
I love how much control it gives you over your designs and how you can use that to make intelligently parametric parts. I'm continuously frustrated by how it expects you to make (or find libraries for) everything from scratch. For example, I've recently discovered ClosePoints which is (a) brilliant and (b) makes me wonder why the heck this functionality isn't built-in or at least in a default library. I've also found that using it for anything complicated has forced me to learn how to write better-organized code.
You still have to put in work to learn how to use it. It's just a different kind of work.
Fuck Autodesk. All my homies hate Autodesk.
Look, I'll happily admit that F360 is an excellent CAD program. It kinda sets the standard, but the constant shifting of the goal posts for the free personal use license, plus the Hotel California nature of cloud streaming the app, just pisses me off.
My brother's using it professionally and he's quite happy with it. But his business is paying for a full license for him, so he gets all the benefits, and very few of the annoyances. He's readily admitted that, were that not the case, he'd be looking at FOSS alternatives himself.
Give Ondsel a try. It's a freecad fork. https://ondsel.com/
Ah FINALLY there is a good fork. FreeCAD exists now for like 15 years, but almost no one uses it because the ui absolutely sucks. And the worst part is, the maintainers know it but they refuse to change it because they think they're geniuses and everyone else should conform to their twisted vision of cad ui instead of following the standard of literally every other cad program out there.
IMO the bigger problem with FreeCAD is the topological naming problem. It's very easy to get frustrated because your model broke due to a change you made in an earlier feature.
The UI isn't amazing though, and that unfortunately happens quite a bit with open source software. Hopefully it'll go the way of Blender and KiCAD with an eventual major release that overhauls the UI.
Yeah, coming in with no prior CAD experience I actually think freecad's interface makes sense, especially since I've used it for both 3d printing (one workbench) and mocking up building plans (a different lumber one I was able to download as an add-on - very cool).
I did run into the topological naming problem once though, and I'm far from a power user, so I've been meaning to check out the real thunder fork.
I keep bashing my head against the horrible UI way more as a beginner. Just as I manage to bring the million toolbars into a reasonable arrangement, I switch workspaces and then they're all messed up again. I couldn't care less about the topological naming problem right now
Hmm, that actually sounds like a bug. I haven't seen that on my end (once I set the locations of options in my toolbars they stay there, even after restarts). You may want to report that on their issue tracker. Sorry that you're having a rough experience!
Ondel has a nicer user interface, but I personally use and recommend realthunder's LinkStable branch of FreeCAD. Mainline FreeCAD (and by extension, Ondsel) suffer from the topological naming problem, which can be especially jarring to users coming from proprietary CAD software. realthunder put a lot of work into a solution that handles the problem pretty well, so I'm using his fork until toponaming gets mainlined.
It's a little janky, but reasonably powerful.
Yeah - just teaching myself how to use it now. Cheers for the community link - wasn't subbed to that one.
I like FreeCAD. I know some people hate it, but I find the requirement to do things carefully and properly to avoid horrible errors later on really focusses my mind on what I'm designing. I end up with something that is probably better designed than if I could just lash something together and let the software sort out the mess.
Exact same situation for me aswell... i was so happy to see that developer version of FreeCAD that completely overhauled the sketcher tool for on the fly defining
I use Autodesk Inventor when at work, but I’m trying to learn FreeCAD for my own hobby project. And while I’ve had to reprogram some workflows I’m slowly getting there. What really excites me about FreeCAD is the different workbenches, such as CfdOf which gives you a nice and understandable gui for OpenFOAM, finally making CFD somewhat accessible to the masses.
There’s also a lot of new and improved functionality coming out with 0.22.
Check out Ondsel. It's a fork of FreeCAD with some additional features and polish.
Yeah I got into Fusion360 a while back but predictably it gets worse and worse. Now I have to learn freecad so I don't run into the same shit again lol
Here's how to not run into topology naming problem: use Parts workbench instead of Part Design
Edit: 69th comment on new instance!
Nice
I'm getting disappointed in F360 as well, but existing open source alternatives are pure cancer. Basically, I've started making my own open source CAD. Hope to release some basic POC in a month or two.
You're saying you're starting from scratch on a brand new CAD program yourself rather than contributing to an existing, established project like FreeCAD?
Cue xkcd comic about how we end up with new standards. It's the same with FOSS projects. Every new stubborn headed dev things they will get it right this time, wasting work instead of contributing and pooling efforts and resources that would get better improvement and quality faster than starting from scratch.
The existence of foss projects should never exclude the creation of alternatives if someone wants to try.
I mean, it would be cooler to not call the existing ones "cancer," but I support them trying something new. Yes, it will be an uphill battle, but wasn't LuaJIT done by a lone genius? I hope they're successful and we have a new CAD option.
They are not pure cancer. You should be more grateful for the effort the FOSS community volunteers are putting into creating a free as in freedom ecosystem, without any reimbursement whatsoever. Instead, they're having their work attacked by folks like you.
Give Solid Edge (from Siemens) a try. It has a free for hobby use edition. It's not perfect, but I'm pretty happy with it, and none of the stupid restrictions of Fusion.
Fusion 360 used to be free for the hobbyist too. FreeCAD is GPL licensed, so it will always be free.
Also GPL is broader free
Had this happen to me as well this week after a few months of not using Fusion 360.
Turns out it’s a software update issue. Just close the app every time it fails, and eventually it will manage to update. I have an insanely fast internet connection, so maybe you need to keep it open for a while to download the updates.
Solvespace
Watch a few of these to get started, skip ahead as needed. It's got some limitations but leagues ahead of freecad in terms of UI and workflow.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGAjLwYQPgaBafzQTLA84IkTOptOdIsUX&si=sci5_24nPVyUEGqm
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/playlist?list=PLGAjLwYQPgaBafzQTLA84IkTOptOdIsUX&si=sci5_24nPVyUEGqm
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/tsarticles/ts/4GAYwrd9SV4MJlh68wUATv.html
But I don't think it works for free accounts.
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