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FreeCAD actually does filleting, apparently. Two different tools. I think the article was claiming that filleting was broken somehow in FreeCAD, not that it did

FreeCAD actually does filleting, apparently. Two different tools. I think the article was claiming that filleting was broken somehow in FreeCAD, not that it didn't exist. It would of been more interesting if they mentioned what problems they had.

Karliss 4y ago
Just tried to do that exercise in FreeCad (0.20.1) and observed following issues with fillets. Initially for one of the inner corners I had selected 2/3 edges for filleting. This caused fillet to bug out and some of vertices be position in completely wrong position far from where they should be resulting in visibly broken self intersection geometry in the are of that corner. Once I selected all 3 edges as asked in the drawing for exercise fillet was fine. But I don't see why it should have failed if the intention was to create model with 2/3 corner edges filleted. In other parts of model corners with such fillets worked fine. Second problem was once I changed the angles and dimensions from phase 1 to phase 2. (I slightly cheated by not handling the bottom part properly but that's more of my failure read the drawing). After changing angle and dimensions fillets broke, and I had to reselect which edges are supposed to have them. (The topological naming problem). Which is slightly weird because the topology of model shouldn't have changed from those dimensions changes, but maybe there was a slight change in how boss intersects with bend, thus changing topology. In which case having to redo fillets is annoying, but slightly more understandable. Third issue was that in the second phase it failed to solve fillets when radius was greater than 1.1mm (drawing asks for 2mm). Not sure why would it fail. I would understand if I asked something crazy like 10mm which would result in some degenerate geometry. But with 2mm it should still be sufficiently far from where it causes weird intersections. Again my best guess is the area with inner corner at the base of boss. There is short edge where outer cylinder of boss connects to bent corner instead of flat part.
DanTheManPR 4y ago
It's more powerful and full-featured than usually given credit for. But there are a lot of common things that are very annoying and janky to do. Filleting is one of the first things that will be an unpleasant surprise to new users, as it's a deceptively difficult problem, and one that commerical packages put of effort into making easy for users.
- regularfry 4y ago
  It doesn't help that the two tools for doing filleting (aaargh why) have quite different UI.

Karliss 4y ago

Just tried to do that exercise in FreeCad (0.20.1) and observed following issues with fillets. Initially for one of the inner corners I had selected 2/3 edges for filleting. This caused fillet to bug out and some of vertices be position in completely wrong position far from where they should be resulting in visibly broken self intersection geometry in the are of that corner. Once I selected all 3 edges as asked in the drawing for exercise fillet was fine. But I don't see why it should have failed if the intention was to create model with 2/3 corner edges filleted. In other parts of model corners with such fillets worked fine. Second problem was once I changed the angles and dimensions from phase 1 to phase 2. (I slightly cheated by not handling the bottom part properly but that's more of my failure read the drawing). After changing angle and dimensions fillets broke, and I had to reselect which edges are supposed to have them. (The topological naming problem). Which is slightly weird because the topology of model shouldn't have changed from those dimensions changes, but maybe there was a slight change in how boss intersects with bend, thus changing topology. In which case having to redo fillets is annoying, but slightly more understandable. Third issue was that in the second phase it failed to solve fillets when radius was greater than 1.1mm (drawing asks for 2mm). Not sure why would it fail. I would understand if I asked something crazy like 10mm which would result in some degenerate geometry. But with 2mm it should still be sufficiently far from where it causes weird intersections. Again my best guess is the area with inner corner at the base of boss. There is short edge where outer cylinder of boss connects to bent corner instead of flat part.

DanTheManPR 4y ago

It's more powerful and full-featured than usually given credit for. But there are a lot of common things that are very annoying and janky to do. Filleting is one of the first things that will be an unpleasant surprise to new users, as it's a deceptively difficult problem, and one that commerical packages put of effort into making easy for users.

regularfry 4y ago
It doesn't help that the two tools for doing filleting (aaargh why) have quite different UI.