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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

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.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    For anyone else wondering, TNP seems to mean "Topological naming problem": https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem
    - throwgfgfd25 2y ago
      Yes! Sorry. It's mentioned in the comments here but it should have occurred to me to expand on it. TNP is really a research-grade problem that all CAD packages have to mitigate -- you can I think still run into issues that stem from face/vertex naming in all CAD packages if you really push them, and there are pathological cases where the solution is only to be consistent in arbitrary choices. But mainline FreeCAD had no solution for this. A solid proof-of-concept implementation has existed in RealThunder's fork (which was originally used for Assembly 3 development) but since the solution touches an awful lot of the code it was never ported across and got increasingly difficult to port. There was reluctance to just switch wholesale to his fork because it contains some somewhat contentious developments, and it has taken some very deliberate, considered rethinking of the organisation of mainline FreeCAD releases to get the TNP code ported, which it now is. There are still TNP issues, and there are still things one should not hope to rely on in FreeCAD -- like building on faces generated by chamfers, drafts or thicknesses. I also think what risks being lost is the wisdom of sometimes deliberately choosing to build some features of a part from the base planes rather than a generated face; it reduces the complexity of dependencies and allows much freer re-working.
tpmoney 2y ago
I want to second the recommendation for Mango Jelly Solutions videos. I've tried FreeCAD on and off for years and those videos are the first ones that finally helped me wrap my head around some things and be able to use it for a real project.

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.
- justinclift 2y ago
  For anyone else wondering, TNP seems to mean "Topological naming problem": https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem https://wiki.freecad.org/Topological_naming_problem
  - throwgfgfd25 2y ago
    Yes! Sorry. It's mentioned in the comments here but it should have occurred to me to expand on it. TNP is really a research-grade problem that all CAD packages have to mitigate -- you can I think still run into issues that stem from face/vertex naming in all CAD packages if you really push them, and there are pathological cases where the solution is only to be consistent in arbitrary choices. But mainline FreeCAD had no solution for this. A solid proof-of-concept implementation has existed in RealThunder's fork (which was originally used for Assembly 3 development) but since the solution touches an awful lot of the code it was never ported across and got increasingly difficult to port. There was reluctance to just switch wholesale to his fork because it contains some somewhat contentious developments, and it has taken some very deliberate, considered rethinking of the organisation of mainline FreeCAD releases to get the TNP code ported, which it now is. There are still TNP issues, and there are still things one should not hope to rely on in FreeCAD -- like building on faces generated by chamfers, drafts or thicknesses. I also think what risks being lost is the wisdom of sometimes deliberately choosing to build some features of a part from the base planes rather than a generated face; it reduces the complexity of dependencies and allows much freer re-working.

tpmoney 2y ago

I want to second the recommendation for Mango Jelly Solutions videos. I've tried FreeCAD on and off for years and those videos are the first ones that finally helped me wrap my head around some things and be able to use it for a real project.