TP is essential.

  • Maalus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    15
    ·
    9 months ago

    Only thing FreeCAD is good for. And then you won’t be able to launch the project once an update hits.

    • wjrii@kbin.socialOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      21
      ·
      9 months ago

      It’s getting better, and it’s critical that it do so, if for no other reason than to raise the floor that commercial offerings have to surpass to retain small-to-medium customers. I haven’t committed to it, but I’m rooting for it and following it closely.

      • morbidcactus@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        9 months ago

        It’s honestly probably in the good enough territory at this point for makers. I think I finally realised how freecad wants me to use it and found it much nicer to work with after that, and I think I found a camera control I can live with coming from primarily solidworks.

        Definitely using more and more, for 70 cad/year I’ll keep my solidworks maker sub for anything I find I can’t do in freecad but I’m really going to try committing to using it this year as my primary cad package. There’s still some quirks but I’m also way more willing to live with that with foss

        • ScottE@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          9 months ago

          I finally realised how freecad wants me to use it and found it much nicer to work with after that

          Exactly this - once people invest the time to understand the FreeCAD flow, and get over it, they’ll find it’s an amazing and extremely productive tool.

          I tried out SolidWorks and it’s a complete mess. You can’t just download and install it, it runs a bunch of weird background programs on the computer, and interacting with the multiple web sites is a nightmare. I’ve been waiting well over a month for them to refund under the promised 30 day guarantee. I’d never, ever do anything with that awful company again.

          I’m really looking forward to see how Ondsel does. I’ve been using it for the last week or two, as it’s integrated 0.22 features, and I think it could be a really good thing for the FreeCAD community.

          • morbidcactus@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            9 months ago

            Oh yeah solidworks connected is a right pain, I use it purely because of my experience with solidworks itself, familiarity goes a long way especially when it’s been a while. Ondsel is what I’ve been using, grabbed it on a whim after it was recommended a few weeks ago. The fact it’s done by a bunch of freecad contributors is interesting to me, and not that I need then but the collab tools look interesting.

            Wrt to the workflow it’s funny because it’s the way I wanted to use it, it totally behaves like other cad packages. I’m definitely sketch first for everything, I just was using the part workbench instead of the PartDesign workbench. I actually really like how freecad handles variables through the spreadsheet, put together the start of some parametric gears for a project idea I have.

            • ScottE@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              9 months ago

              I’ve found the same thing with regard to workflow - I find it really weird when people say it’s nothing like any other CAD programs, because it really is. You start with sketches and build up from there. Yes, the spreadsheet feature is amazing! I couldn’t believe SolidWorks forces you to buy Excel to do the same thing, which is crazy. The spreadsheet integration in FreeCAD is great - with the macro that handles the reference labels.

              • wjrii@kbin.socialOP
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                edit-2
                9 months ago

                At my rather beginner level, designing single parts for a 3D printer or laser engraver, it behaves almost exactly like most other parametric-history CAD apps in the broad concepts. The devil is just in the details, really. Shortcuts are different, terminology is different, Certain QoL and UI elements are either missing or somewhere else. The workbench model is not unique, but some of the kruft that has built up around FreeCAD’s benches and the defaults (better in recent versions if you look at the start screen) can make a new user “nope out” if they have other options. I guess assemblies in particular remain a fragmented area and lag behind the commercial packages, and I can say for certain that it still requires “good design practices” in a way that some of the commercial apps manage around, toponaming the biggest among them.

                If all the negatives kill your workflow to the point that you want to pay for commercial software or live with the limitations (current and potential) of their free tiers, then that’s absolutely understandable. Commercially, it’s doubly so, and with addition of the “business reality” that there’s also no one to blame or sue if FreeCAD is not working for you. Hell, I don’t use it for all my stuff either, as I find no-history modeling still mostly works for what I’m doing and I have some free or cheap options in that space that are decent, but I can see the appeal as I’m starting to make things that could benefit from tweaks after the fact. What I get frustrated by is claims that FreeCAD “is no good” or “will never be useful”. I call BS. It’s already good and useful for many use cases, and anyway the number of free parametric CAD suites that do not restrict your use of your designs is exactly ONE. Otherwise, you’re looking at an absolute minimum of $300 a year to subscribe and hope that Shapr3D’s new history functionality doesn’t break, and that neither they nor Alibre gets gobbled up.

      • Maalus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        9 months ago

        Okay, sure it’s getting better. But the reality is - you need to be able to depend on your CAD to work. I’ve used FreeCAD a lot. It simply isn’t dependable and can’t do the same things a different cad package can. It’s parametric only by name.

          • Maalus@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            9 months ago

            And yet most people using a cad package need to create very complex things instead.

        • ScottE@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          9 months ago

          There’s not a single thing you can’t do in FreeCAD that you can do in other CAD programs - but you do have to understand how it works and it’s limitations.

          • Maalus@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            9 months ago

            Which you don’t have to do with other programs. There stuff works. In FreeCAD, it doesn’t. And no, it isn’t as simple as “do it like the tutorials do”. Parametrization breaks all the time simply because you want to change a dimension halfway down the stack. It just sucks.

    • ScottE@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      9 months ago

      Strongly disagree. There’s nothing I can do in any of the commercial CAD programs that I can’t do in FreeCAD. Most people just don’t want to invest the time to learn it - and instead blame the tool. Yes, there’s a learning curve and it requires understanding the tool’s limitations, but if it wasn’t for FreeCAD we’d have nothing in the free, open source space for CAD.

      • Maalus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        I’ve been doing work in freecad for a year and a half, learning all the time. I also jumped on Solidworks for startups. Freecad simply doesn’t work for anything a tiny bit complicated. Both Solidworks and Fusion blow it out of the water in ease of use and reliability.

    • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      9 months ago

      Free cad is brilliant especially if you come from a more technical understanding rather than an artistic one.

      • Maalus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        9 months ago

        There are different cad packages that do everything that freecad does more intuitively, faster and neater. In addition they do a whole lot more than freecad does. I come from a “more technical understanding” - it just sucks compared to the competition.