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.
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.
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.
any advice on getting constraints to actually behave? I can’t seem to get it to actually create geometries more complex than a box. (and forget master-sketches. that irritates me.)
Here is a tip: constraints don’t need to behave. You can leave parts unconstrained and it will still work.
You can just eyeball the placement, and make sure the constraints that matter are constrained. The rest you can leave floating freely.
Doesn’t thaT really scare things up later if (when) you need to make adjustments?
I’ve almost never left something unconstrained that I haven’t regretted later.
Which workbench do you mean? Are you okay with basic sketch/extrude, part design works well enough, but as you say constraints can be a pain. Tbh just assume you’re working with the points for the most part - polylines work fine for slightly more complicated shapes.
My “formal” CAD training was Dassault Systeme’s CATIA V5 training manual, so I tend to default back to that. For basic geometries, use basic polygon shapes/combinations of those, for anything more complex I tend to use a polyline and sketch out a rough shape, then fully constrain to the dimension I need. If the geometry goes all to hell then stop and just use the mouse to grab a point and pull it back to where it should be before you go any further and then constrain it. (My sketches tend to be noisy with constraints just FYI).
Mangojelly’s guides on YouTube will get you pretty far (though he doesn’t constrain as much as I personally would, I suspect this is just because he’s demoing techniques rather than giving best practice at all times. he knows the software/techniques super well and is great at explaining it).
Based on Mango’s recent video there are a ton of enhancements for sketcher constraints on the latest dev branch, so hopefully they’ll be on main soon too.
If it’s assembly constraints, the only assembly workbench I’ve used is assembly3 - it works kind of how you’d expect an assembly workbench to work, but you do need to hold its hand a bit. I’ve gotten into the habit of, import as step, rename part, add to list of parts, use linear translation with the mouse to get the part roughly where it needs to be and then start applying constraints to put it where I want it.
I’m mostly talking about part design.
I’ve discovered freecad is great for FEM, though. (well, the best option that doesn’t cost oodles.) Mostly I design…elsewhere and import the meshes for that. I’ll give Mango’s videos a look.
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.
Check out the Adventures in Creation YT (or Piped) channel. He does a very exhaustive set of tutorials from beginner to advanced that is well produced and explained.
MangoJelly (also on youtube) has a bunch of beginner friendly FreeCad tutorials.
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.
Don’t bring the marmite into this!
But it splatters so well, when you throw it at someone I disagree with!
“Thou has missed daily prayers for two whole weeks”
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
Can you tell us more about this?
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.
My favorite feature of FreeCAD is the spreadsheet. F360’s Parameters window…it’s been awhile since I’ve used it, but you weren’t able to rearrange or sort parameters, there weren’t any hotkeys or ways to quickly enter values so you had to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse a lot, plus it wasn’t as multifunctional.
Give Ondsel a try. It’s a freecad fork. https://ondsel.com/
Why?
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.
This looks interesting. In your opinion, does it improve on FreeCAD much? I tried FreeCAD some time ago and I felt like an absolute moron
At this point it’s a just a fork of freecad with a slight ui overhaul and some usability improvements. It’s still freecad underneath. Ondsels product is their freecad compatible collaborative cloud. They have made some changes to the workers to simply them and are contributing it back to main freecad. But the learning curve is still there. The bugs on Windows that can crash your projects still occur. But you can use wsl to install the Linux version and not have any issues.
Check out Ondsel. It’s a fork of FreeCAD with some additional features and polish.
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.
Yeah, I’m on 1Gbps fibre and have been trying a few times. It just seemed to get an update, so hopefully that’s it. Bloody annoying.
https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/tsarticles/ts/4GAYwrd9SV4MJlh68wUATv.html
But I don’t think it works for free accounts.
Fuck Autodesk. All my homies hate Autodesk.
Solid Edge, Free for non-enterprise and actually very good… For now…
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?
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.
I use Fusion every day for like 10 hours a day and never see these messages. You just have a local bug. If you aren’t making production models then the free services are for you. This software is still a bargain compared to what was available 15 years ago.
