3DPrinting

Thank you!

Imagine what the FOSS CAD space would look like if AutoCAD etc didn't offer anything for makers!

Fusion 360 is amazing in the Getting Shit Done^tm^ department, which is the weak point of FreeCAD. I have managed to steer through the byzantine UI of FreeCAD to create a CAD model, but it needed support by someone who has spent years in that application to get the more complex stuff, and even he didn't exactly know how to achieve it, and that's on top of me having participated in a 16 hour workshop on how to use FreeCAD. For Fusion 360, I've watched a few 5 minute videos on their official channel and that's it, everything else I was able to accomplish through just looking at the UI.

I learned Fusion 360 before FreeCAD, so it's not just that I had prior experience in another similar tool.

I think the basic problem with FreeCAD is that it's a collection of tool benches written by different people who don't talk to each other. They have overlapping responsibilities while still having vastly different feature sets and don't integrate with each other most of the time. So, if you want to create a model, you first have to plan ahead to understand what kind of features it's going to have, and based on that, you have to decide which collection of tool benches you have to pick. More than once I picked the wrong one in the start and then had to do everything all over again in the different one once I ran into a dead end.

Fusion 360 feels like it was written by a single team with a single vision, and everything fits together.

I like to refer to that license model as "Drawbackware." "We'll offer a less expensive or free version with a lot of the usefulness gouged out."

Yeah, but I need my CAD software to work. I'm working using it. I'm not here to be a bulwark against the corporations to gimp myself and not use something better.

I won't say that FreeCAD has a good UX, but it helps a lot NOT to look at it as a CAD software, but as a collection of specialized engineering tools, organized into workspaces, haphazardly put together.

First thing you need to know is which workspace you'll need, and FreeCAD does a terrible job at explaining you that (the concept of workspaces isn't self explanatory) AND describing what each and every one of them does. Some of which should just be disabled by default because of how fringe, unpolished or unreliable they are.

Once you've got that part cleared, you can learn the primitives and the jargon (what's a body, solid, part, mesh, element, …), not great, but fair. Then, you have to learn, for every workbench, what their workflow is (e.g. create a body, create a sketch, apply transformations ; Create an analysis, define material, define loads, add a mesh, add solver, add equations, run solver, add results, tweak the pipeline so it renders, show results), and yep, FreeCAD won't hold your hand for any of that, you'll have to wear your explorer hat and navigate from frustration to incomprehension until it accidentally works.

But then, if you can get over that, you'll end-up with a tool that's more powerful and versatile than anything else, including dandy commercial offerings. It still blows my mind that nowadays anyone in their garage can do for free what not so long ago would require a full engineering curriculum and corporate sponsorship to acquire licenses. My hope is that FreeCAD would gain the same kind of visibility that Blender enjoys, with sufficient funds for a small dev team and a great product manager.

I didn’t know about and was one of the reasons I was not using free as. Now I’ll have to try it again.

I agree! It does enforce being clean and thoughtful about your design. But the inability to use a single sketch for more than one operation still bugs me. I loved being able to plan out and see all (or at least multiple) features in a single sketch in Fusion. In FreeCAD I can only figure out how to do this by making a master sketch and then projecting single features out to multiple other sketches, which works, but like everything in FreeCAD, just takes more time...

Exactly this - FreeCAD is great, but you have to learn to do things its way if you want stable designs. While there is a learning curve, it's really no worse than Fusion360 was in figuring out how to achieve my design goals. There are fantastic YouTube channels out there, like MangoJelly when you do get stuck. I converted all my older designs from Fusion360 to FreeCAD, and everything since is in FreeCAD, and I haven't looked back. I think many people are just afraid to admit they are daunted by FreeCAD, and rather than work to understand it, they just complain and say it's bad, without ever actually putting any effort into learning the platform.

FreeCAD does indeed perform a single operation on a given sketch, but I think the problem you're encountering is the fact that FreeCAD cannot perform any operation to solidify a sketch that would result in more than one discontiguous solid.

You can, for example, totally extrude 3 concentric circles into a pad provided they intersect another solid surface that at the very least spans the gap between the edges of the circles. Your example in particular results in a cylinder with a hole in it, and another cylinder centered in that hole. The geometry is not actually ambiguous:

The above is just one sketch to create the rectangle, and then the other sketch is precisely what you described, three concentric circles of random diameter:

I did this in the bog standard 0.21 release, not the Realthunder fork, and with no other additions, mods, or workbenches.

Downloads are here: https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases

You have to expand the "Assets" button under the text and download one of the two "Win" versions.

Here's a direct link: https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases/download/Tip/FreeCAD-Link-Tip-Win-x86_64-py3.11-20231102.7z

Ain't it this? Random Lemmy stranger, but this seems to be what you want. It might require you to have Python 3.8, but then again, I know nothing of the program and only reply becase no one did yet. https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases/download/Tip/FreeCAD-Link-Tip-Win-x86_64-py3.8-20231102.7z

I also used SuperSlicer until I recently tried OrcaSlicer and was very impressed. The developer of SuperSlicer recently quit his job to work on it full time though, so I imagine it will start to catch up in features soon.

I don't use it for.. reasons, but I suspect orcaslicer has picked up a lot of what made superslicer special, and is actively maintained.

I don't think they are really comparable.

Personally I see blender more as an animation or organic modeling tool whereas CAD software like fusion is better when you need exact dimensions for your parts

How does graph paper stack against a canvas? One is for engineering, the other is for art.

Also, FreeCAD is at least a decade behind Blender in the "No it's actually really good now and is actually being widely adopted in industry" department.

I know a bunch of people already told you that they are not the same program, but this is the way I always think about them:

Blender is like modeling with clay. You mold it, push it around, and stick more pieces on here and there.

FreeCAD is like modeling with building blocks. You measure the part you need and select the block's that build that part. You can also swap out blocks for different blocks at any time.

Blender is not CAD, they don't stack at all.

Blender is a swiss army knife, not really comparable, but i'd recommend it over most CAD software if your main focus is 3d printing as most slicer convert to mesh data anyway.

Im not going to try and convince people who have already made their mind up, but I ditched Fusion for Blender ages ago and haven't looked back. Its completely usable for CAD and precision design for 3D printing or what have you. Its not built for it, but its capable if you learn how.

The lack of pure CAD focus is a drawback, but it is largely made up for in blenders absolutely amazing general purpose tool set. Its not just mesh manipulation, with geometry nodes you can create complex intricate shapes that are also precise to your requirements. There are countless workflows and plugins that allow you to make blender adapt your needs. You can remix existing STLs and bring in reference photos/models/etc. Simply put IMO there is no need to use any other program for almost any aspect of 3D design, and so it has become my go to.

I don't recommend it for beginners, but it really is an incredibly powerful tool if you put the work in. Is it better that FreeCAD or Fusion? I am not qualified to say, but I'm pretty confident there are few features either package has that blender does not.