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I have pretty mixed feelings about FreeCAD, having used it for 100+ hours across a few different projects. It’s wonderful to have a open-source alternative to

I have pretty mixed feelings about FreeCAD, having used it for 100+ hours across a few different projects. It’s wonderful to have a open-source alternative to the expensive CAD software that muscled its way into a near monopoly in academia/industry, but it suffers from some really inexcusable design problems, on a fundamental level. As it is, I don’t think it’s really usable as a serious tool for creating complex assemblies. I’d be curious if anyone here has managed to use it effectively for a large project (something real-world, not just showcasing FreeCAD).

haberman 5y ago
> some really inexcusable design problems, on a fundamental level Can you be more specific? I understand that the Topological Naming Problem is big (discussed in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSsVFu929jo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSsVFu929jo), but as I understand it this is being fixed in the RealThunder branch (https://bit.ly/3iBzQly https://bit.ly/3iBzQly), and fixes may be flowing from this into FreeCAD 0.2.
- jackyinger 5y ago
  My complaint is that it is extremely modal and as a result not very friendly, not intuitive even to a relatively experienced CAD user. I’ve used a variety of CAD and it just really didn’t click. I know it’s open source, so not going to be as UX oriented, but still. I would love to be proved wrong. If there’s something I’m missing please share.
  - haberman 5y ago
    I've experienced that user unfriendliness too. I'm not at all an expert in this, I'm a FreeCAD newbie that has been trying to decide whether to invest in learning FreeCAD or not. I keep wishing that FreeCAD had the UI polish of Blender, and ask myself if Blender can do enough of the CAD workflows that it makes sense to learn Blender instead of FreeCAD. I keep reading that technically speaking, mesh-based modelers are woefully insufficient for CAD tasks. But then I see videos like this, which suggest that Blender can handle most modeling tasks, with the main exception of bevels and chamfers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5SehCbhxFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5SehCbhxFs
    - jackyinger 5y ago
      Mesh modeling in blender has similar downfalls to OpenSCAD. When you’re designing a bit of precision equipment (or what have you) you don’t want your circles turned into high degree polygons. Can a lathe turn a polygon? Can a drill drill a polygonal hole? Maybe you can machine a polygon on a fancy CNC lathe, but you certainly wouldn’t do so for a turbine shaft. Also for less precise things, say construction, you care about dimensions. Select an arc to get it’s radius for instance. This is why design for traditional construction techniques best done in boundary representations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation I will concede that one can easily create nasty insoluble problems with boundary representations if not familiar with the limitations of splines, but this only really is a problem with curvy things like ship’s hulls and aircraft.
    - eindiran 5y ago
      There is no downside in my opinion to learning a bit of OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, and Blender and reaching for the right tool when you need it. Personally, I have found the UI/UX of FreeCAD painful to use, but it is sufficient for most of my CAD needs. And after Fusion 360 crippled their hobbyist licensing, I don't really want to get in bed with any of the non-free CAD tools.
  - phoenix3200 5y ago
    I found OpenSCAD to be very friendly for parametric designs, but after a while I switched to the SolidPython wrapper as it was more flexible. However, I'm hunting for a better way to create 3d models via code (Blender Python?) because 'extrude_along_path'->SolidPython->OpenSCAD->stl export simply could not handle my model.
    - jackyinger 5y ago
      OpenSCAD is great in some ways, but the fact that everything gets boils straight to triangles drives me nuts. If there were an OpenSCAD equivalent to work with boundary representation models I’d have found my CAD nirvana.
      - dTal 5y ago
        ZenCad? https://mirmik.github.io/zencad/en/index.html https://mirmik.github.io/zencad/en/index.html
      - eggsome 5y ago
        Would this fit the bill? https://solvespace.com/index.pl https://solvespace.com/index.pl
    - floatboth 5y ago
      CadQuery should be better as it is using the OpenCASCADE cad kernel (same as FreeCAD) instead of a simplistic ad-hoc thingy.
      - jackyinger 5y ago
        Thanks for pointing this out! Looks pretty useful, will give it a shot.
      - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
        I honestly think CadQuery has more promise as a way to get open source 3D components and modules to the mainstream, because it's fundamentally code, and can be reasoned about as such (diffed, merged, blamed, parameterised, modularised, reused and tested). Putting SolidWorks or FreeCad file into source control is a very different thing. Also, as it's natively Python, you have all sorts of library support, up to and including things like numpy.
  - jbay808 5y ago
    Did you find the Part Design workflow? It took a while for Freecad to click for me but it ends up being fairly similar to other CAD programs in terms of workflow.
- floatboth 5y ago
  A fundamental problem is that OpenCASCADE, despite being the most advanced open source CAD kernel, does kinda suck. It's single-threaded (FreeCAD has it on the main thread so any long operation blocks the entire UI) and it's… rather buggy. Recent fun example I've encountered: doing a fillet in two places at the same time can result in either an unhelpful "resulting shape is invalid" or a crash inside OpenCASCADE, depending on the selection order (!) — https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/issues/202 https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/issues/202
  - jbay808 5y ago
    I have noticed that fillets in particular are a weak point for FreeCAD.
- rq1 5y ago
  Topological naming issue is the biggest problem that they should address immediately. Otherwise they can’t call it a parametric drawing tool. Period. I discovered the issue in a middle of a design where I tried to change what I thought was a parametric piece. It unrecoverable blew up everything. I kind of lost trust in it after that. I ended up making a backup for every step on top of the regular backups, like: piece_name-step-1… etc. I discovered the real thunder branch too late.
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    Maybe they should just scrap everything, make RealThunder lead dev, and start over from where he is... I'm sure there's some great stuff in mainline though that deserves merging.
imglorp 5y ago
Curious if you have compared to SolveSpace?
- phoenix3200 5y ago
  Wow, that looks like what I may be after!
- floatboth 5y ago
  Last time I used SolveSpace, what I hated the most was how the undo button was near useless.. and https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/91 https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/91 is still open :/
  - phkahler 5y ago
    Undo/redo works great and now has a 100 step history.
psadauskas 5y ago
I agree. I'm working on a project to finish my basement, and decided to use FreeCAD for it. It mostly worked, but did weird things often enough it was frustrating. Often the solution was to look up on the forums for a hack to do things in a certain order and it would work. Sometimes there was no solution, like trying to print a floor plan of my 3d model always did weird things with the scale and the labels. I could mostly get it to "work", but really lacked polish that made using it more of a chore than I'd like, and I don't feel like I got the full power out of using it.
nikitaga 5y ago
Personally I also ran into some inexcusable bugs on my first try of FreeCAD recently. Sadly I don't have the link anymore, but the problem was offsets being incorrectly calculated in certain cases, and I found it to be a long standing bug in their issue tracker. There wasn't an easy way to work around it so I had to look elsewhere. Too bad, because FreeCAD did seem quite fine otherwise (Note: I never used SolidWorks, and my demands are amateur level). For programmers I highly recommend OpenSCAD or Cadquery, which let you write code to build your models instead of using GUI. With this approach, "parametric" comes naturally, and so you don't need to learn a special constraint system, it's just your code (and a bit of math). Cadquery was a bit hard to get started with being essentially a bunch of python scripts, but it's also more versatile and more powerful than OpenSCAD, and has a good collection of examples in their docs. OpenSCAD is still great for e.g. building simple models for 3D printing.
- sebazzz 5y ago
  Even for simple models I've found OpenSCAD lacking. In 3d printing it is quite common to add chamfers and fillets to smooth objects. This is an extraordinarily amount of work in OpenSCAD, let alone the render times that increase significantly.
jacknews 5y ago
I will give the latest version another go. I last used it 3 years ago, and I agree, I found it difficult to use, and worse, it would frequently corrupt the model, or confuse the object hierarchy to the point I would have to start again.
eternityforest 5y ago
Nothing large(I'm not a mechanical guy, this is all incidental work) but I use the RealThunder branch at my job, and I'm building some furniture that I don't think I could ever have done without the software. I've never used any other CAD though, so my evaluation might not mean much, to me, just having CAD at all completely changes everything, regardless of whether it's good or not, when your reference point is LibreOffice Draw and pen+paper.

haberman 5y ago

> some really inexcusable design problems, on a fundamental level Can you be more specific? I understand that the Topological Naming Problem is big (discussed in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSsVFu929jo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSsVFu929jo), but as I understand it this is being fixed in the RealThunder branch (https://bit.ly/3iBzQly https://bit.ly/3iBzQly), and fixes may be flowing from this into FreeCAD 0.2.

jackyinger 5y ago
My complaint is that it is extremely modal and as a result not very friendly, not intuitive even to a relatively experienced CAD user. I’ve used a variety of CAD and it just really didn’t click. I know it’s open source, so not going to be as UX oriented, but still. I would love to be proved wrong. If there’s something I’m missing please share.
- haberman 5y ago
  I've experienced that user unfriendliness too. I'm not at all an expert in this, I'm a FreeCAD newbie that has been trying to decide whether to invest in learning FreeCAD or not. I keep wishing that FreeCAD had the UI polish of Blender, and ask myself if Blender can do enough of the CAD workflows that it makes sense to learn Blender instead of FreeCAD. I keep reading that technically speaking, mesh-based modelers are woefully insufficient for CAD tasks. But then I see videos like this, which suggest that Blender can handle most modeling tasks, with the main exception of bevels and chamfers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5SehCbhxFs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5SehCbhxFs
  - jackyinger 5y ago
    Mesh modeling in blender has similar downfalls to OpenSCAD. When you’re designing a bit of precision equipment (or what have you) you don’t want your circles turned into high degree polygons. Can a lathe turn a polygon? Can a drill drill a polygonal hole? Maybe you can machine a polygon on a fancy CNC lathe, but you certainly wouldn’t do so for a turbine shaft. Also for less precise things, say construction, you care about dimensions. Select an arc to get it’s radius for instance. This is why design for traditional construction techniques best done in boundary representations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation I will concede that one can easily create nasty insoluble problems with boundary representations if not familiar with the limitations of splines, but this only really is a problem with curvy things like ship’s hulls and aircraft.
  - eindiran 5y ago
    There is no downside in my opinion to learning a bit of OpenSCAD, FreeCAD, and Blender and reaching for the right tool when you need it. Personally, I have found the UI/UX of FreeCAD painful to use, but it is sufficient for most of my CAD needs. And after Fusion 360 crippled their hobbyist licensing, I don't really want to get in bed with any of the non-free CAD tools.
- phoenix3200 5y ago
  I found OpenSCAD to be very friendly for parametric designs, but after a while I switched to the SolidPython wrapper as it was more flexible. However, I'm hunting for a better way to create 3d models via code (Blender Python?) because 'extrude_along_path'->SolidPython->OpenSCAD->stl export simply could not handle my model.
  - jackyinger 5y ago
    OpenSCAD is great in some ways, but the fact that everything gets boils straight to triangles drives me nuts. If there were an OpenSCAD equivalent to work with boundary representation models I’d have found my CAD nirvana.
    - dTal 5y ago
      ZenCad? https://mirmik.github.io/zencad/en/index.html https://mirmik.github.io/zencad/en/index.html
    - eggsome 5y ago
      Would this fit the bill? https://solvespace.com/index.pl https://solvespace.com/index.pl
  - floatboth 5y ago
    CadQuery should be better as it is using the OpenCASCADE cad kernel (same as FreeCAD) instead of a simplistic ad-hoc thingy.
    - jackyinger 5y ago
      Thanks for pointing this out! Looks pretty useful, will give it a shot.
    - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
      I honestly think CadQuery has more promise as a way to get open source 3D components and modules to the mainstream, because it's fundamentally code, and can be reasoned about as such (diffed, merged, blamed, parameterised, modularised, reused and tested). Putting SolidWorks or FreeCad file into source control is a very different thing. Also, as it's natively Python, you have all sorts of library support, up to and including things like numpy.
- jbay808 5y ago
  Did you find the Part Design workflow? It took a while for Freecad to click for me but it ends up being fairly similar to other CAD programs in terms of workflow.
floatboth 5y ago
A fundamental problem is that OpenCASCADE, despite being the most advanced open source CAD kernel, does kinda suck. It's single-threaded (FreeCAD has it on the main thread so any long operation blocks the entire UI) and it's… rather buggy. Recent fun example I've encountered: doing a fillet in two places at the same time can result in either an unhelpful "resulting shape is invalid" or a crash inside OpenCASCADE, depending on the selection order (!) — https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/issues/202 https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/issues/202
- jbay808 5y ago
  I have noticed that fillets in particular are a weak point for FreeCAD.
rq1 5y ago
Topological naming issue is the biggest problem that they should address immediately. Otherwise they can’t call it a parametric drawing tool. Period. I discovered the issue in a middle of a design where I tried to change what I thought was a parametric piece. It unrecoverable blew up everything. I kind of lost trust in it after that. I ended up making a backup for every step on top of the regular backups, like: piece_name-step-1… etc. I discovered the real thunder branch too late.
- eternityforest 5y ago
  Maybe they should just scrap everything, make RealThunder lead dev, and start over from where he is... I'm sure there's some great stuff in mainline though that deserves merging.

imglorp 5y ago

Curious if you have compared to SolveSpace?

phoenix3200 5y ago
Wow, that looks like what I may be after!
floatboth 5y ago
Last time I used SolveSpace, what I hated the most was how the undo button was near useless.. and https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/91 https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/91 is still open :/
- phkahler 5y ago
  Undo/redo works great and now has a 100 step history.

psadauskas 5y ago

I agree. I'm working on a project to finish my basement, and decided to use FreeCAD for it. It mostly worked, but did weird things often enough it was frustrating. Often the solution was to look up on the forums for a hack to do things in a certain order and it would work. Sometimes there was no solution, like trying to print a floor plan of my 3d model always did weird things with the scale and the labels. I could mostly get it to "work", but really lacked polish that made using it more of a chore than I'd like, and I don't feel like I got the full power out of using it.

nikitaga 5y ago

Personally I also ran into some inexcusable bugs on my first try of FreeCAD recently. Sadly I don't have the link anymore, but the problem was offsets being incorrectly calculated in certain cases, and I found it to be a long standing bug in their issue tracker. There wasn't an easy way to work around it so I had to look elsewhere. Too bad, because FreeCAD did seem quite fine otherwise (Note: I never used SolidWorks, and my demands are amateur level). For programmers I highly recommend OpenSCAD or Cadquery, which let you write code to build your models instead of using GUI. With this approach, "parametric" comes naturally, and so you don't need to learn a special constraint system, it's just your code (and a bit of math). Cadquery was a bit hard to get started with being essentially a bunch of python scripts, but it's also more versatile and more powerful than OpenSCAD, and has a good collection of examples in their docs. OpenSCAD is still great for e.g. building simple models for 3D printing.

sebazzz 5y ago
Even for simple models I've found OpenSCAD lacking. In 3d printing it is quite common to add chamfers and fillets to smooth objects. This is an extraordinarily amount of work in OpenSCAD, let alone the render times that increase significantly.

jacknews 5y ago

I will give the latest version another go. I last used it 3 years ago, and I agree, I found it difficult to use, and worse, it would frequently corrupt the model, or confuse the object hierarchy to the point I would have to start again.

eternityforest 5y ago

Nothing large(I'm not a mechanical guy, this is all incidental work) but I use the RealThunder branch at my job, and I'm building some furniture that I don't think I could ever have done without the software. I've never used any other CAD though, so my evaluation might not mean much, to me, just having CAD at all completely changes everything, regardless of whether it's good or not, when your reference point is LibreOffice Draw and pen+paper.