13 ms·

The first release candidate of FreeCAD 1.0 is out

379 points by jstanley 2y ago

observationist 2y ago
Definitely want to get a link back to the main site in your blog header - right now you have to edit the URL. Great work! Happy to see this, open and free tools make the world a better place.
taeric 2y ago
Oh wow, super excited to see this posted. Will be on the lookout for updated tutorials. If anyone has good suggestions there, I'm game to check them out.
- cristoperb 2y ago
  I recently found this youtuber. He has a playlist for 0.22 (which is the dev version for what will be 1.0): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc3UYXXfSglVpfWdX31F-e5S https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc3UYXXfSglV...
Palomides 2y ago
prelininary release notes: https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0 https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0 the headliner is definitely topological naming improvements
- alright2565 2y ago
  IMO the biggest thing is the auto-dimension tool. Instead of remembering 10 different keyboard shortcuts or constantly having to click on the toolbar, I just need to remember a single shortcut.
- throwgfgfd25 2y ago
  I would say the most significant things for most hobby CAD users are: * topological naming issue mitigations -- this is mostly solved enough that you can rely on it, though there are definitely still times when it makes more sense to use sketches offset from the base planes * the new integrated Assembly workbench (and solver) though I've not dabbled with this myself * really significant improvements in the sketcher (easier dimensioning, curved slots, polar arrays and improvements to the array tools controls, offset/scale, automatic midpoint constraints) * support for bodies with multiple non-overlapping solids in Part Design * useful subtle improvements to Part Design array tools * some support for operations (pads/revolves/pockets) on only selected shapes from a sketch in Part Design * I don't do CNC yet but I think there are improvements in the CNC workbench that would benefit hobbyists. I would put the UI improvements somewhere lower down the list, frankly, than they do, because I find them often confusing and regularly frustrating on laptop screens, but: * the new dark theme is really nice * OpenTheme's dark theme works well * quick transparency toggling is helpful * and the optional tab bar for workbench switching helps make various disparate workbench tools just that much quicker to get to, somehow, making it all feel a little closer-knit
  - 9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
    Polar arrays will bring me running back to FreeCAD. There are some geometries that are really hard to sketch if you can't use polar arrays.
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    > the new integrated Assembly workbench (and solver) though I've not dabbled with this myself FreeCad badly needed this. I will try it out. Any complex drawing quickly go out of hand without assemblies. Also, finaly there seem to be some real measurement ulitity! 'Std Measure'. I've gone made trying to build some parts I made in FreeCad without a sane way to measure distances. I so want FreeCad to kick some entrenched corp ass.
eig 2y ago
Super excited about this! I hope more people will pick it up in the hobbyist space now that Fusion costs money. I'm not sure what the popularity of these different CAD softwares are. I've seen quite a few hobbyists use OnShape recently, and a few people use OpenScad. I don't think I've seen another FreeCad user in real life though.
- luckydata 2y ago
  Hope that the new changes make freecad a little more accessible. Coming from Fusion I really tried to make it work for me but the UI is so awkward and abstruse I quickly gave up.
- qwerpy 2y ago
  > now that Fusion costs money I know they've been obnoxiously chipping away at the features available in their Personal edition and introducing artificial limitations. But my free installation still works and I haven't seen any indications that it's going away.
  - joshvm 2y ago
    Fusion as a CAD engine is great. I've not used the CAM side, and while I used to use Eagle a lot I've tried to invest more energy into Kicad. The online limitations are frustrating though. Randomly and inconsistently not being able to export STLs because of a "translation service error" (when it could 2 minutes ago), or the inability to make drawings with the free edition. I mostly use it because there isn't anything else half as good for OS X that works offline.
    - dekhn 2y ago
      Fusion 360 CAM is great for me (hobbyist doing CNC with wood and other materials). It's handled some pretty tough jobs, like a full topo map of california. It's why I pay for the product. I tried the electronics stuff in Fusion and decided not to use it because it didn't work nearly as well as Kicad.
    - qwerpy 2y ago
daghamm 2y ago
I've always felt freecad being superior to most other free CAD tools. But I can almost never get it to work for me. Every time there is a new major release I try it only to rage quit two hours later. Really hope they get someone to help them with stability and UX improvements like Blender did.
- throwgfgfd25 2y ago
  UX work is ongoing. Stability is good in the latest dev builds on the Mac, though 0.21.2 is the least crashy I've seen it. But if you mean stability in terms of model stability/robustness when changing things, that's improved a lot with the topological naming mitigations. It's still not perfect, and I still think FreeCAD is a lifestyle choice. But I enjoy working in it a lot more. The Mango Jelly Solutions videos on Youtube are very, very worth a watch if you feel inclined to have another go; they have been the best thing for getting my mind into how FreeCAD works as a package (in the sense that it is a "package" at all -- it's really still a collection of overlapping, macro-programmable toolsets gathered around a kernel).
  - mort96 2y ago
    The thing I don't get is, it's over 20 years old. Surely if those th8ngs were ever going to improve they'd have done so over the past 20 years?
    - tecleandor 2y ago
      Blender changed, FreeCAD can. Just the topology naming fix is a HUGE change that lots of people could have said a couple years ago that it would never be fixed.
    - throwgfgfd25 2y ago
      CAD is never made quickly, I think. But FreeCAD was just not that sort of project. It's a C++ and Python wrapper around a CAD kernel, supporting a set of tools -- some frustrating tools, some quite powerful or niche, like the ThreadProfile workbench or the guitar workbench -- and it has never bothered the highly technical community of users much to unify things. They weren't really trying to make a major competitor to commercial CAD: they were trying to have the tools that they individually needed and collaborate on the problems they had in common. The balance has markedly shifted since 0.18 and now there is that focus, and significant commercial impetus. In the time I have used it -- about three years on and off -- it has clearly become more of a focus to make a complete product. ETA: there is no doubt that one of the major things that needs to be resolved is the duality between Part workbench and Part Design workbench flows. There appear to be some discussions about this -- about how to either merge them or create a new, future workflow that makes better use of them. The crux of it has always been that a section of the community thinks the Part Design feature-oriented flow is a bit of a crutch, being as it is implemented as a set of implicit booleans on top of the basic flow. Part Design is more fun to use for a beginner, but it is definitely not faster, and one of the real problems is that once you are in the feature flow you are kind of stuck in it -- it's possible to merge in objects made in the Part flow but only in relatively basic ways (starting a PD body with a "base feature", or fusing the PD body with the non-PD stuff at the end). I would expect future development to look at this much more seriously, but there was and is no point in getting into it in more depth until the major TNP issues are truly behind FreeCAD, because a feature-oriented flow especially relies on there not being problems there.
rqtwteye 2y ago
FreeCAD reminds me a little of the GIMP. Super powerful but somehow the UI is just hard to deal with.
- tylerflick 2y ago
  The workflows are so much harder to remember than Gimp’s though. I find myself running back to OpenSCAD every time I give it a shot.
  - jopsen 2y ago
    For simple stuff I've been pleasantly surprised by dune3d: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d
  - derekp7 2y ago
    OpenSCAD's main problem is when you get to code of any complexity. I'm ok with the language itself (it looks procedural but is really somewhat declarative), but I keep hitting up against a brick wall with the CSG processing. Note, however that their nightly builds are much faster, if you enable Manifold (a replacement CSG library that is much faster). In fact, a current design I'm working on wouldn't be possible if I hadn't switched to their nightly builds.
leros 2y ago
From what I hear of FreeCAD, it sounds like it's going to be awesome and widely used, but not for 5-10 years. Anyone have enough experience to back that up? I'm personally using Fusion 360 and OpenSCAD.
- LtWorf 2y ago
  It works, I 3d print my board games with it.
- jdevy 2y ago
  I have 100s of hours of FreeCAD experience from my day job designing injection molded parts for toys. For some background, for about ~3-4 years (~5 years ago) I started using FreeCAD 1.18.1 in my job (and even more before that for hobby use). I am used to using open-source software with bad UI, so that's not my major complaint. As long as you stick mostly in the Part Design, Part, and TechDraw workbenches, you should get used to the UI. I used the main branch of FreeCAD up until 1.19.1 but then switched to RealThunder's LinkBranch [2]. I switched for the topological naming fixes (some introduced in this 1.0), assembly workbench (not the same as in this 1.0), and other many quality of life fixes (multiple solids per body and 3D offsets for most Part Design boolean operations). It was never great but it got the job done. As long as you never need complex organic 3D surfaces, FreeCAD can work - or at least the LinkBranch did for me, I'll have to test 1.0. However, my biggest complaint is with the CAD engine FreeCAD uses: OpenCASCADE (OCCT) [1]. As with most CAD engines, this thing is OLD. It does not like to make NURBS surfaces with true tangency to other faces, and it really doesn't like when fillits cross edges into other faces. You will spend hours adjusting cosmetic geometry so that dress up features like fillits and chamfers will apply. Unless some group of PhDs with some hardcore C/C++ experience come along or the company that develops OCCT gets some major funding, I don't think FreeCAD will improve enough for day-to-day design of complex parts for a long time. Nowadays, I use Fusion 360. I prefer SolidWorks but Fusion is all my job offers me currently. For a CAD package, and coming from years of FreeCAD, Fusion 360 just works. I have tools for making arbitrary complex surfaces (could still be better), I can create fillets that cross into other faces (most of the time), and I can go back in history and edit features and my model will rebuild itself (to a limit, but even the FreeCAD LinkBranch had more issues than Fusion even though it was better than vanilla 1.19.1 and 1.20 FreeCAD). Fusion also has a proper assembly system, which is essential! You can cheat and create parts in FreeCAD by linking sketches to geometry in other parts, but it can only get you so far before you need to go back in time and everything breaks upon a rebuild. I hate to say it, but FreeCAD has a lot of work to do other than the UI. I want to use FreeCAD but it wastes too much of my time for professional work. I would still use it for simple hobby projects. I could talk for hours on this stuff. [1] https://github.com/Open-Cascade-SAS/OCCT https://github.com/Open-Cascade-SAS/OCCT [2] https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases
rowanG077 2y ago
I can't believe people aren't mentioning solvespace. Basically my cad journey started with openscad. Which I quickly discarded for cadquery. Which I used for a bit. And now I use solvespace. Imo they all suck. Solvespace has serious issues with anything round. It's basically a no go to design anything that is round in it. I wanted to design a simple pen like structure with a slot, turned out to be impossible. Perhaps I'll get so annoyed I go back to cadquery...
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Have you considered, perhaps, trying the FreeCAD 1.0 release candidate? It should be very quick to make this. Part Design -> sketch -> draw your pen shape -> revolution to make it round; then sketch -> pocket to make the slot.
- hantusk 2y ago
  Check out build123d, which has a nicer api for cadquery. I draw sketches in svg if the sketch shapes become too unmanagable to express in code
- bvrmn 2y ago
  +++ for build123d. Just finished TTT tutorial models and it was quite fun. There are some issues with non-regular fillets and 3d offsets but they are minor comparing to FreeCad crashes. Build123d algebra mode is fantastic, especially after your find out how to compose faces from custom line chains. Documentation is good, though many tricks how to get non-trivial tangent points could be found only in examples.
syntaxing 2y ago
Super stoked for this, used to a mechanical engineer and I mainly use solidworks maker or fusion 360 to scratch my itch when I design stuff around the household. As “old school” as the UI is, it has a lot of parallel with catia v5. It’s kinda like vim/emacs, you don’t get it until you do.
- gerdesj 2y ago
  I once had to deliver multiple DB Catia environments to multiple groups of designers's PCs. We used a chained series of Novell (as was) Zenworks apps (bundles these days). The environments are largely defined through env vars. So, an app to deliver the various versions of the code, followed by an app to set the env vars for the job in hand, followed by an app to tweak, say drive letters and other things and finally another one to start the interface. All of that lot is defined within a GUI. You could capture the env vars through a "snapshot" - basically a diff. from before and after an application installation on a test machine. Nowadays you'd probably use Ansible and a lot of guesswork and farting around. I'm a sysadmin but I have been trying to get to grips with FreeCAD for years. Mind you, I once got my parents to buy me a 80287 maths co-pro. so I could run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD 2(?) I gather that the FreeCAD kernel can now deal with a lot of weird stuff and not go mad when you make ill-advised constraints. As for emacs/vim - not for me mate! I compiled emacs on a Pentium II and decided against it after a while. I tolerate vim because it is ubiquitous, but then so is dandruff.
  - syntaxing 2y ago
    Yup, a lot of things show when you use software that was first released from 1998. The first company I worked for that used catia has about 10 seats. A special sysadmin we hired that specialized in CAD admin wrote a special powershell script to set everything up. He was awesome and taught me how to write my own vba macros. I now work for a major automaker and they have these precompiled binaries that does everything for you. It’s kinda crazy to think you need a team of engineers to write and maintain an in house codebase just to make sure everything is installed correctly.
BikeShuester 2y ago
Just wanted to share my experience with combining OpenCAD and some AI models for small-scale 3D printing projects. So far, it's been a real game-changer. The precision and accuracy have been impressive. Has anyone else taken this combo to the next level? I'm curious to know if there are any brick walls I'm not seeing yet. Are there limitations or challenges that come with scaling up this approach? Would love to hear about others' experiences with OpenCAD + AI in 3D printing.
- justinclift 2y ago
  That sounds super interesting. What's the approach you've been using for this?
- pineaux 2y ago
  Show us what you made until now?
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  What is OpenCAD? Do you mean OpenSCAD? Or FreeCAD?
Always42 2y ago
Unless you have solidworks through your job or school, FreeCAD on mac is the way to go. Solidworks is great until you have to buy your own license. This costs MULTIPLE thousands of dollars. You cannot purchase a "hobby" version that actually gives you the desktop version. I used solidworks up until my company license got pulled. Additionally im not a student anymore so no luck there. I used to use Fusion - but it was never as nice as solidworks. My student edition expired and now im out of that to. Now I use FreeCAD on Mac. Takes time to adjust and I cannot model as quickly, but saving $$$$
- thrtythreeforty 2y ago
  You can rent a non-commercial license for $99 a year. Still sucks because it's the usual SaaS hostage situation. They also recently raised the price of a real license by making you purchase a couple years of updates (which are typically ~worthless as a user). I was half prepared to swallow the $4k or so but that extra bump made me balk again. There is no moderately priced, fully featured CAD on the market. Unless FreeCAD has recently overhauled their UI, it is immensely painful to do things which are 2 clicks in Solidworks.
  - _glass 2y ago
    How about https://www.plasticity.xyz/ https://www.plasticity.xyz/? I didn't try yet, but looks great.
    - linsomniac 2y ago
      I just picked up Plasticity earlier this week to start trying to learn it, it's been on my radar for a while. I've been using TinkerCAD for years for making my simple models, and it works really well for the basics but there are things that become painful there that Plasticity has promise of making a lot easier. One of the first tutorials I went through was really frustrating though. Some of it may be that Plasticity is a quickly moving target right now (lots of tutorials are for v0.x or 1.4, with current being v24, for an idea). A lot of the pain was this tutorial just didn't touch on the basics it was assuming you knew. Some of it was just getting used to the tool and figuring out what mode you are in and which you need to be in to accomplish what you need to do. I struggled a lot with just getting keyboard shortcuts and the trackpad navigation to work. I never did find a description of mouse/trackpad mappings (possibly made worse by there being ~5 themes you can select from). It shows a lot of promise, but there's going to be a bit of a learning curve. But there was a learning curve on TinkerCAD too, I just need to keep that in mind. Pricing is ok: free 30 day trial, $150 for a license with 1 year of updates, and $299 for the Studio license. I don't use CAD that much, like maybe a model a month or less, so it's kind of a big bite to take for me personally, especially with it being young and likely to need to spend $150/year for a while here as it's revving up. The Studio version's xNURBS feature seems like it might be really enticing, but just makes that even harder for me to bite off. I probably should try OnShape just because they do have that free plan. I'm also looking at OpenSCAD for doing parameterized models. I installed it last night and asked Perplexity AI to generate a model, and it made a good start at it, but couldn't quite get the tongue-and-groove right.
Nezghul 2y ago
I personally consider FreeCAD very far from stable. All I need to do is to open random example projects to speedrun to some warning/error/exception/segfault.
- declan_roberts 2y ago
  I find it exceedingly frustrating to use. I knew I was in for a bad experience when I opened it up for the first time and I couldn't even select some components of the screen because the high resolution DPI monitor made some things unclickable because the pixel boundary box was impossibly small.
guadalupe4151 2y ago
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IgorPartola 2y ago
Does anyone have any good resources on learning FreeCAD? I didn’t exactly find the interface approachable. Typically I use OpenSCAD for my basic 3D modeling needs.
- kiba 2y ago
  I think the interface had improved recently.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  The Hackspace folks did a series of articles and put them out as a PDF: https://hackspace.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad https://hackspace.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad (last time I printed it, I had to add a blank to get things to duplex right)
- greesil 2y ago
  YouTube. I make some pretty basic things to 3d print with FreeCAD and everything I've learned came from YouTube. Typically for me it just new part, new spreadsheet, part design, sketch with dimensions parameterized from spreadsheet. Pad or some other boolean of solids, repeat starting at new sketch.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  I like JokoEngineering's tutorial videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odr5viqPwkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odr5viqPwkc My first tip for most people would be to start with the Part Design workbench, although if you're coming from OpenSCAD, you might prefer the Part workbench. FreeCAD has many different workbenches for handling various use cases, such as architectural models, surface trimeshes, 2D machine shop drawings, and so on. The various workbenches do mostly work together well, but for a beginner it's intimidating to have so many options. "Part Design" is probably the most familiar approach for people coming from high-end CAD programs like SolidWorks; it uses the 2D sketch + extrude workflow. The similarly-named Part workbench is for people who prefer to think in terms of boolean operations on solids, which is generally the OpenSCAD way.
- infogulch 2y ago
  Commenters in another thread recommend Mango Jelly tutorials. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41515552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41515552 https://www.youtube.com/@MangoJellySolutions https://www.youtube.com/@MangoJellySolutions
globalnode 2y ago
Also, librecad is great for 2d work, house plans, projected profile views etc.
mark-r 2y ago
It's a little annoying that I couldn't find a description on their site of what FreeCAD actually is.
- adastra22 2y ago
  It’s a free CAD software?
  - mark-r 2y ago
    Yes, that part's obvious just by the name. But what OS does it run on, or does it run in the browser? What features does it have?
    - throwgfgfd25 2y ago
      It is C++/Qt/Python/OpenCASCADE, runs on Linux, Windows, Mac. Pretty low compromise in terms of portability; surprisingly good on Mac, has ARM support. I think on FreeBSD/OpenBSD as well via ports. It is a bRep GUI CAD system with 2D drafting, 3D CAD, a technical drawing workbench, FEM, mesh tools etc., and now a core CAD assembly tool. It has a "workbench" (think GUI plugins for specific task) approach, supports macro recording of Python macros, has many third-party workbenches, It is constraints-based and fully parametric: designs recompute and reflow when underlying measurements change. It's also a 20 year labour of love by a bunch of CAD users. If you are familiar with QGIS, it's really a lot like that but for CAD. It's less like GIMP than some people say, but it is a bit like GIMP (and like GIMP, is in a long battle with a core architectural problem; FreeCAD 1.0 includes a big victory over its worst core problem)
      - mark-r 2y ago
        Thank you, that's all very good information. I was just a little frustrated because none of that was discoverable either in the announcement linked from HN, or their home page.
    - kayge 2y ago
      Here ya go! https://wiki.freecad.org/Frequently_asked_questions https://wiki.freecad.org/Frequently_asked_questions https://www.freecad.org/features.php https://www.freecad.org/features.php
dvh 2y ago
If you ever rage quitted FreeCAD then give OpenSCAD a try. It's completely different workflow and I love it. It perfectly clicked with the way I work and think.
- marmakoide 2y ago
  I rage quitted OpenSCAD for FreeCAD :p For real, because I am way more productive with FreeCAD. FreeCAD allows to work in term of topological features like surfaces, edges, etc which is, in practice, very cumbersome with OpenSCAD.
- guitarbill 2y ago
  If you like OpenSCAD but want a fillet or two and STEP export, Build123d is great also.
rcarmo 2y ago
Sadly, the UX is still pants compared to Shapr3D or Fusion. Yes, it looks slightly better and there are improvements, but still very far from being enough to match either of them in terms of actual workflow. My biggest gripe is that it still feels like a bit of a bag of squirrels (changing workbenches can still lead to unpredictable results and importing STEP is still buggy).
emmelaich 2y ago
Better link would not to the comments but to the page. https://blog.freecad.org/2024/09/10/the-first-release-candidate-of-freecad-1-0-is-out/ https://blog.freecad.org/2024/09/10/the-first-release-candid...
- rubyfan 2y ago
  Also this for people wanting to know more about FreeCAD. https://www.freecad.org/ https://www.freecad.org/ There was no link to the main site from the blog on mobile.
marmakoide 2y ago
Fixing the topological naming issue, in the mainline, what a game changer. I am using Freecad for Actual Real Things. I learned to work around the topological naming issue, but it cost me time, and it can make parametric models quite brittle (ie. a minor change can break the model).
- jononor 2y ago
  Yeah I am very much looking forward to that. Over the last 10 years I have made a couple of hundreds of designs in FreeCAD that I have manufactured in smal scale - with FDM/SLA/SLS 3d printing, CO2/fiber laser, and CNC milling in woods/plastics/metals. So it has been plenty productive. But quite often doing workarounds for the topological naming problem, either preemptively or corrective. Maybe I will start to teach it again to others :)
- guerby 2y ago
  Was curious about the issue, found this: https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem
jgeowugejsb 2y ago
[flagged]
resource_waste 2y ago
I've completed huge projects on FreeCAD. Highly recommended. I imagine lots of complaints are either outdated, or by people who are used to different CAD systems and expect them to work exactly the same. I've tried and worked with Catia, solidworks, and fusion 360, and I can easily complain about each of those for being confusing.
- prokoudine 2y ago
  What kind of projects? Is there a story to tell on FreeCAD's blog?
LanternLight83 2y ago
I got a printer recently, tried Blender bc it was what I knew, then FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, CadQuery, and Build123D. The last two are Python frameworks built on the same OpenCascade kernal that powers FreeCAD, and I really reccomend them to software folks looking to work in version-controlled plain-text.

379 points by jstanley 2y ago

Definitely want to get a link back to the main site in your blog header - right now you have to edit the URL. Great work! Happy to see this, open and free tools make the world a better place.

taeric 2y ago

Oh wow, super excited to see this posted. Will be on the lookout for updated tutorials. If anyone has good suggestions there, I'm game to check them out.

cristoperb 2y ago
I recently found this youtuber. He has a playlist for 0.22 (which is the dev version for what will be 1.0): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc3UYXXfSglVpfWdX31F-e5S https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWuyJLVUNtc3UYXXfSglV...

Palomides 2y ago

prelininary release notes: https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0 https://wiki.freecad.org/Release_notes_1.0 the headliner is definitely topological naming improvements

alright2565 2y ago
IMO the biggest thing is the auto-dimension tool. Instead of remembering 10 different keyboard shortcuts or constantly having to click on the toolbar, I just need to remember a single shortcut.
throwgfgfd25 2y ago
I would say the most significant things for most hobby CAD users are: * topological naming issue mitigations -- this is mostly solved enough that you can rely on it, though there are definitely still times when it makes more sense to use sketches offset from the base planes * the new integrated Assembly workbench (and solver) though I've not dabbled with this myself * really significant improvements in the sketcher (easier dimensioning, curved slots, polar arrays and improvements to the array tools controls, offset/scale, automatic midpoint constraints) * support for bodies with multiple non-overlapping solids in Part Design * useful subtle improvements to Part Design array tools * some support for operations (pads/revolves/pockets) on only selected shapes from a sketch in Part Design * I don't do CNC yet but I think there are improvements in the CNC workbench that would benefit hobbyists. I would put the UI improvements somewhere lower down the list, frankly, than they do, because I find them often confusing and regularly frustrating on laptop screens, but: * the new dark theme is really nice * OpenTheme's dark theme works well * quick transparency toggling is helpful * and the optional tab bar for workbench switching helps make various disparate workbench tools just that much quicker to get to, somehow, making it all feel a little closer-knit
- 9cb14c1ec0 2y ago
  Polar arrays will bring me running back to FreeCAD. There are some geometries that are really hard to sketch if you can't use polar arrays.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  > the new integrated Assembly workbench (and solver) though I've not dabbled with this myself FreeCad badly needed this. I will try it out. Any complex drawing quickly go out of hand without assemblies. Also, finaly there seem to be some real measurement ulitity! 'Std Measure'. I've gone made trying to build some parts I made in FreeCad without a sane way to measure distances. I so want FreeCad to kick some entrenched corp ass.

eig 2y ago

Super excited about this! I hope more people will pick it up in the hobbyist space now that Fusion costs money. I'm not sure what the popularity of these different CAD softwares are. I've seen quite a few hobbyists use OnShape recently, and a few people use OpenScad. I don't think I've seen another FreeCad user in real life though.

luckydata 2y ago
Hope that the new changes make freecad a little more accessible. Coming from Fusion I really tried to make it work for me but the UI is so awkward and abstruse I quickly gave up.
qwerpy 2y ago
> now that Fusion costs money I know they've been obnoxiously chipping away at the features available in their Personal edition and introducing artificial limitations. But my free installation still works and I haven't seen any indications that it's going away.
- joshvm 2y ago
  Fusion as a CAD engine is great. I've not used the CAM side, and while I used to use Eagle a lot I've tried to invest more energy into Kicad. The online limitations are frustrating though. Randomly and inconsistently not being able to export STLs because of a "translation service error" (when it could 2 minutes ago), or the inability to make drawings with the free edition. I mostly use it because there isn't anything else half as good for OS X that works offline.
  - dekhn 2y ago
    Fusion 360 CAM is great for me (hobbyist doing CNC with wood and other materials). It's handled some pretty tough jobs, like a full topo map of california. It's why I pay for the product. I tried the electronics stuff in Fusion and decided not to use it because it didn't work nearly as well as Kicad.
  - qwerpy 2y ago

daghamm 2y ago

I've always felt freecad being superior to most other free CAD tools. But I can almost never get it to work for me. Every time there is a new major release I try it only to rage quit two hours later. Really hope they get someone to help them with stability and UX improvements like Blender did.

throwgfgfd25 2y ago
UX work is ongoing. Stability is good in the latest dev builds on the Mac, though 0.21.2 is the least crashy I've seen it. But if you mean stability in terms of model stability/robustness when changing things, that's improved a lot with the topological naming mitigations. It's still not perfect, and I still think FreeCAD is a lifestyle choice. But I enjoy working in it a lot more. The Mango Jelly Solutions videos on Youtube are very, very worth a watch if you feel inclined to have another go; they have been the best thing for getting my mind into how FreeCAD works as a package (in the sense that it is a "package" at all -- it's really still a collection of overlapping, macro-programmable toolsets gathered around a kernel).
- mort96 2y ago
  The thing I don't get is, it's over 20 years old. Surely if those th8ngs were ever going to improve they'd have done so over the past 20 years?
  - tecleandor 2y ago
    Blender changed, FreeCAD can. Just the topology naming fix is a HUGE change that lots of people could have said a couple years ago that it would never be fixed.
  - throwgfgfd25 2y ago
    CAD is never made quickly, I think. But FreeCAD was just not that sort of project. It's a C++ and Python wrapper around a CAD kernel, supporting a set of tools -- some frustrating tools, some quite powerful or niche, like the ThreadProfile workbench or the guitar workbench -- and it has never bothered the highly technical community of users much to unify things. They weren't really trying to make a major competitor to commercial CAD: they were trying to have the tools that they individually needed and collaborate on the problems they had in common. The balance has markedly shifted since 0.18 and now there is that focus, and significant commercial impetus. In the time I have used it -- about three years on and off -- it has clearly become more of a focus to make a complete product. ETA: there is no doubt that one of the major things that needs to be resolved is the duality between Part workbench and Part Design workbench flows. There appear to be some discussions about this -- about how to either merge them or create a new, future workflow that makes better use of them. The crux of it has always been that a section of the community thinks the Part Design feature-oriented flow is a bit of a crutch, being as it is implemented as a set of implicit booleans on top of the basic flow. Part Design is more fun to use for a beginner, but it is definitely not faster, and one of the real problems is that once you are in the feature flow you are kind of stuck in it -- it's possible to merge in objects made in the Part flow but only in relatively basic ways (starting a PD body with a "base feature", or fusing the PD body with the non-PD stuff at the end). I would expect future development to look at this much more seriously, but there was and is no point in getting into it in more depth until the major TNP issues are truly behind FreeCAD, because a feature-oriented flow especially relies on there not being problems there.

rqtwteye 2y ago

FreeCAD reminds me a little of the GIMP. Super powerful but somehow the UI is just hard to deal with.

tylerflick 2y ago
The workflows are so much harder to remember than Gimp’s though. I find myself running back to OpenSCAD every time I give it a shot.
- jopsen 2y ago
  For simple stuff I've been pleasantly surprised by dune3d: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d
- derekp7 2y ago
  OpenSCAD's main problem is when you get to code of any complexity. I'm ok with the language itself (it looks procedural but is really somewhat declarative), but I keep hitting up against a brick wall with the CSG processing. Note, however that their nightly builds are much faster, if you enable Manifold (a replacement CSG library that is much faster). In fact, a current design I'm working on wouldn't be possible if I hadn't switched to their nightly builds.

leros 2y ago

From what I hear of FreeCAD, it sounds like it's going to be awesome and widely used, but not for 5-10 years. Anyone have enough experience to back that up? I'm personally using Fusion 360 and OpenSCAD.

LtWorf 2y ago
It works, I 3d print my board games with it.
jdevy 2y ago
I have 100s of hours of FreeCAD experience from my day job designing injection molded parts for toys. For some background, for about ~3-4 years (~5 years ago) I started using FreeCAD 1.18.1 in my job (and even more before that for hobby use). I am used to using open-source software with bad UI, so that's not my major complaint. As long as you stick mostly in the Part Design, Part, and TechDraw workbenches, you should get used to the UI. I used the main branch of FreeCAD up until 1.19.1 but then switched to RealThunder's LinkBranch [2]. I switched for the topological naming fixes (some introduced in this 1.0), assembly workbench (not the same as in this 1.0), and other many quality of life fixes (multiple solids per body and 3D offsets for most Part Design boolean operations). It was never great but it got the job done. As long as you never need complex organic 3D surfaces, FreeCAD can work - or at least the LinkBranch did for me, I'll have to test 1.0. However, my biggest complaint is with the CAD engine FreeCAD uses: OpenCASCADE (OCCT) [1]. As with most CAD engines, this thing is OLD. It does not like to make NURBS surfaces with true tangency to other faces, and it really doesn't like when fillits cross edges into other faces. You will spend hours adjusting cosmetic geometry so that dress up features like fillits and chamfers will apply. Unless some group of PhDs with some hardcore C/C++ experience come along or the company that develops OCCT gets some major funding, I don't think FreeCAD will improve enough for day-to-day design of complex parts for a long time. Nowadays, I use Fusion 360. I prefer SolidWorks but Fusion is all my job offers me currently. For a CAD package, and coming from years of FreeCAD, Fusion 360 just works. I have tools for making arbitrary complex surfaces (could still be better), I can create fillets that cross into other faces (most of the time), and I can go back in history and edit features and my model will rebuild itself (to a limit, but even the FreeCAD LinkBranch had more issues than Fusion even though it was better than vanilla 1.19.1 and 1.20 FreeCAD). Fusion also has a proper assembly system, which is essential! You can cheat and create parts in FreeCAD by linking sketches to geometry in other parts, but it can only get you so far before you need to go back in time and everything breaks upon a rebuild. I hate to say it, but FreeCAD has a lot of work to do other than the UI. I want to use FreeCAD but it wastes too much of my time for professional work. I would still use it for simple hobby projects. I could talk for hours on this stuff. [1] https://github.com/Open-Cascade-SAS/OCCT https://github.com/Open-Cascade-SAS/OCCT [2] https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases

rowanG077 2y ago

I can't believe people aren't mentioning solvespace. Basically my cad journey started with openscad. Which I quickly discarded for cadquery. Which I used for a bit. And now I use solvespace. Imo they all suck. Solvespace has serious issues with anything round. It's basically a no go to design anything that is round in it. I wanted to design a simple pen like structure with a slot, turned out to be impossible. Perhaps I'll get so annoyed I go back to cadquery...

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
Have you considered, perhaps, trying the FreeCAD 1.0 release candidate? It should be very quick to make this. Part Design -> sketch -> draw your pen shape -> revolution to make it round; then sketch -> pocket to make the slot.
hantusk 2y ago
Check out build123d, which has a nicer api for cadquery. I draw sketches in svg if the sketch shapes become too unmanagable to express in code
bvrmn 2y ago
+++ for build123d. Just finished TTT tutorial models and it was quite fun. There are some issues with non-regular fillets and 3d offsets but they are minor comparing to FreeCad crashes. Build123d algebra mode is fantastic, especially after your find out how to compose faces from custom line chains. Documentation is good, though many tricks how to get non-trivial tangent points could be found only in examples.

syntaxing 2y ago

Super stoked for this, used to a mechanical engineer and I mainly use solidworks maker or fusion 360 to scratch my itch when I design stuff around the household. As “old school” as the UI is, it has a lot of parallel with catia v5. It’s kinda like vim/emacs, you don’t get it until you do.

gerdesj 2y ago
I once had to deliver multiple DB Catia environments to multiple groups of designers's PCs. We used a chained series of Novell (as was) Zenworks apps (bundles these days). The environments are largely defined through env vars. So, an app to deliver the various versions of the code, followed by an app to set the env vars for the job in hand, followed by an app to tweak, say drive letters and other things and finally another one to start the interface. All of that lot is defined within a GUI. You could capture the env vars through a "snapshot" - basically a diff. from before and after an application installation on a test machine. Nowadays you'd probably use Ansible and a lot of guesswork and farting around. I'm a sysadmin but I have been trying to get to grips with FreeCAD for years. Mind you, I once got my parents to buy me a 80287 maths co-pro. so I could run a dodgy copy of AutoCAD 2(?) I gather that the FreeCAD kernel can now deal with a lot of weird stuff and not go mad when you make ill-advised constraints. As for emacs/vim - not for me mate! I compiled emacs on a Pentium II and decided against it after a while. I tolerate vim because it is ubiquitous, but then so is dandruff.
- syntaxing 2y ago
  Yup, a lot of things show when you use software that was first released from 1998. The first company I worked for that used catia has about 10 seats. A special sysadmin we hired that specialized in CAD admin wrote a special powershell script to set everything up. He was awesome and taught me how to write my own vba macros. I now work for a major automaker and they have these precompiled binaries that does everything for you. It’s kinda crazy to think you need a team of engineers to write and maintain an in house codebase just to make sure everything is installed correctly.

BikeShuester 2y ago

Just wanted to share my experience with combining OpenCAD and some AI models for small-scale 3D printing projects. So far, it's been a real game-changer. The precision and accuracy have been impressive. Has anyone else taken this combo to the next level? I'm curious to know if there are any brick walls I'm not seeing yet. Are there limitations or challenges that come with scaling up this approach? Would love to hear about others' experiences with OpenCAD + AI in 3D printing.

justinclift 2y ago
That sounds super interesting. What's the approach you've been using for this?
pineaux 2y ago
Show us what you made until now?
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
What is OpenCAD? Do you mean OpenSCAD? Or FreeCAD?

Always42 2y ago

Unless you have solidworks through your job or school, FreeCAD on mac is the way to go. Solidworks is great until you have to buy your own license. This costs MULTIPLE thousands of dollars. You cannot purchase a "hobby" version that actually gives you the desktop version. I used solidworks up until my company license got pulled. Additionally im not a student anymore so no luck there. I used to use Fusion - but it was never as nice as solidworks. My student edition expired and now im out of that to. Now I use FreeCAD on Mac. Takes time to adjust and I cannot model as quickly, but saving $$$$

thrtythreeforty 2y ago
You can rent a non-commercial license for $99 a year. Still sucks because it's the usual SaaS hostage situation. They also recently raised the price of a real license by making you purchase a couple years of updates (which are typically ~worthless as a user). I was half prepared to swallow the $4k or so but that extra bump made me balk again. There is no moderately priced, fully featured CAD on the market. Unless FreeCAD has recently overhauled their UI, it is immensely painful to do things which are 2 clicks in Solidworks.
- _glass 2y ago
  How about https://www.plasticity.xyz/ https://www.plasticity.xyz/? I didn't try yet, but looks great.
  - linsomniac 2y ago
    I just picked up Plasticity earlier this week to start trying to learn it, it's been on my radar for a while. I've been using TinkerCAD for years for making my simple models, and it works really well for the basics but there are things that become painful there that Plasticity has promise of making a lot easier. One of the first tutorials I went through was really frustrating though. Some of it may be that Plasticity is a quickly moving target right now (lots of tutorials are for v0.x or 1.4, with current being v24, for an idea). A lot of the pain was this tutorial just didn't touch on the basics it was assuming you knew. Some of it was just getting used to the tool and figuring out what mode you are in and which you need to be in to accomplish what you need to do. I struggled a lot with just getting keyboard shortcuts and the trackpad navigation to work. I never did find a description of mouse/trackpad mappings (possibly made worse by there being ~5 themes you can select from). It shows a lot of promise, but there's going to be a bit of a learning curve. But there was a learning curve on TinkerCAD too, I just need to keep that in mind. Pricing is ok: free 30 day trial, $150 for a license with 1 year of updates, and $299 for the Studio license. I don't use CAD that much, like maybe a model a month or less, so it's kind of a big bite to take for me personally, especially with it being young and likely to need to spend $150/year for a while here as it's revving up. The Studio version's xNURBS feature seems like it might be really enticing, but just makes that even harder for me to bite off. I probably should try OnShape just because they do have that free plan. I'm also looking at OpenSCAD for doing parameterized models. I installed it last night and asked Perplexity AI to generate a model, and it made a good start at it, but couldn't quite get the tongue-and-groove right.

Nezghul 2y ago

I personally consider FreeCAD very far from stable. All I need to do is to open random example projects to speedrun to some warning/error/exception/segfault.

declan_roberts 2y ago
I find it exceedingly frustrating to use. I knew I was in for a bad experience when I opened it up for the first time and I couldn't even select some components of the screen because the high resolution DPI monitor made some things unclickable because the pixel boundary box was impossibly small.

guadalupe4151 2y ago

[dead]

IgorPartola 2y ago

Does anyone have any good resources on learning FreeCAD? I didn’t exactly find the interface approachable. Typically I use OpenSCAD for my basic 3D modeling needs.

kiba 2y ago
I think the interface had improved recently.
WillAdams 2y ago
The Hackspace folks did a series of articles and put them out as a PDF: https://hackspace.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad https://hackspace.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad (last time I printed it, I had to add a blank to get things to duplex right)
greesil 2y ago
YouTube. I make some pretty basic things to 3d print with FreeCAD and everything I've learned came from YouTube. Typically for me it just new part, new spreadsheet, part design, sketch with dimensions parameterized from spreadsheet. Pad or some other boolean of solids, repeat starting at new sketch.
mitthrowaway2 2y ago
I like JokoEngineering's tutorial videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odr5viqPwkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odr5viqPwkc My first tip for most people would be to start with the Part Design workbench, although if you're coming from OpenSCAD, you might prefer the Part workbench. FreeCAD has many different workbenches for handling various use cases, such as architectural models, surface trimeshes, 2D machine shop drawings, and so on. The various workbenches do mostly work together well, but for a beginner it's intimidating to have so many options. "Part Design" is probably the most familiar approach for people coming from high-end CAD programs like SolidWorks; it uses the 2D sketch + extrude workflow. The similarly-named Part workbench is for people who prefer to think in terms of boolean operations on solids, which is generally the OpenSCAD way.
infogulch 2y ago
Commenters in another thread recommend Mango Jelly tutorials. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41515552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41515552 https://www.youtube.com/@MangoJellySolutions https://www.youtube.com/@MangoJellySolutions

globalnode 2y ago

Also, librecad is great for 2d work, house plans, projected profile views etc.

mark-r 2y ago

It's a little annoying that I couldn't find a description on their site of what FreeCAD actually is.

adastra22 2y ago
It’s a free CAD software?
- mark-r 2y ago
  Yes, that part's obvious just by the name. But what OS does it run on, or does it run in the browser? What features does it have?
  - throwgfgfd25 2y ago
    It is C++/Qt/Python/OpenCASCADE, runs on Linux, Windows, Mac. Pretty low compromise in terms of portability; surprisingly good on Mac, has ARM support. I think on FreeBSD/OpenBSD as well via ports. It is a bRep GUI CAD system with 2D drafting, 3D CAD, a technical drawing workbench, FEM, mesh tools etc., and now a core CAD assembly tool. It has a "workbench" (think GUI plugins for specific task) approach, supports macro recording of Python macros, has many third-party workbenches, It is constraints-based and fully parametric: designs recompute and reflow when underlying measurements change. It's also a 20 year labour of love by a bunch of CAD users. If you are familiar with QGIS, it's really a lot like that but for CAD. It's less like GIMP than some people say, but it is a bit like GIMP (and like GIMP, is in a long battle with a core architectural problem; FreeCAD 1.0 includes a big victory over its worst core problem)
    - mark-r 2y ago
      Thank you, that's all very good information. I was just a little frustrated because none of that was discoverable either in the announcement linked from HN, or their home page.
  - kayge 2y ago
    Here ya go! https://wiki.freecad.org/Frequently_asked_questions https://wiki.freecad.org/Frequently_asked_questions https://www.freecad.org/features.php https://www.freecad.org/features.php

dvh 2y ago

If you ever rage quitted FreeCAD then give OpenSCAD a try. It's completely different workflow and I love it. It perfectly clicked with the way I work and think.

marmakoide 2y ago
I rage quitted OpenSCAD for FreeCAD :p For real, because I am way more productive with FreeCAD. FreeCAD allows to work in term of topological features like surfaces, edges, etc which is, in practice, very cumbersome with OpenSCAD.
guitarbill 2y ago
If you like OpenSCAD but want a fillet or two and STEP export, Build123d is great also.

rcarmo 2y ago

Sadly, the UX is still pants compared to Shapr3D or Fusion. Yes, it looks slightly better and there are improvements, but still very far from being enough to match either of them in terms of actual workflow. My biggest gripe is that it still feels like a bit of a bag of squirrels (changing workbenches can still lead to unpredictable results and importing STEP is still buggy).

emmelaich 2y ago

Better link would not to the comments but to the page. https://blog.freecad.org/2024/09/10/the-first-release-candidate-of-freecad-1-0-is-out/ https://blog.freecad.org/2024/09/10/the-first-release-candid...

rubyfan 2y ago
Also this for people wanting to know more about FreeCAD. https://www.freecad.org/ https://www.freecad.org/ There was no link to the main site from the blog on mobile.

marmakoide 2y ago

Fixing the topological naming issue, in the mainline, what a game changer. I am using Freecad for Actual Real Things. I learned to work around the topological naming issue, but it cost me time, and it can make parametric models quite brittle (ie. a minor change can break the model).

jononor 2y ago
Yeah I am very much looking forward to that. Over the last 10 years I have made a couple of hundreds of designs in FreeCAD that I have manufactured in smal scale - with FDM/SLA/SLS 3d printing, CO2/fiber laser, and CNC milling in woods/plastics/metals. So it has been plenty productive. But quite often doing workarounds for the topological naming problem, either preemptively or corrective. Maybe I will start to teach it again to others :)
guerby 2y ago
Was curious about the issue, found this: https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem

jgeowugejsb 2y ago

[flagged]

resource_waste 2y ago

I've completed huge projects on FreeCAD. Highly recommended. I imagine lots of complaints are either outdated, or by people who are used to different CAD systems and expect them to work exactly the same. I've tried and worked with Catia, solidworks, and fusion 360, and I can easily complain about each of those for being confusing.

prokoudine 2y ago
What kind of projects? Is there a story to tell on FreeCAD's blog?

LanternLight83 2y ago

I got a printer recently, tried Blender bc it was what I knew, then FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, CadQuery, and Build123D. The last two are Python frameworks built on the same OpenCascade kernal that powers FreeCAD, and I really reccomend them to software folks looking to work in version-controlled plain-text.