FreeCAD is an open-source parametric 3D modeler
(www.freecad.org)
I need to learn cad. Would you choose freecad or solvespace. I have played a bit in solve space but haven't tried freecad yet.
Long story short, my company has a detailing department that uses all the fancy paid CAD softwares like AdvancedSteel, TeklaStructures and so on, I am not apart of that department but I have to be able to view and interpret the 3D models they make, so I installed FreeCAD on my work desktop and the experience has been quite rough, essentially it does not do a great job at importing files exported from these fancy softwares, I have to fiddle and tinker with different settings every single time and it sucks.
Perhaps I’m using it wrong, feel free to call me out on it as CAD isn’t really apart of my expertise.
FreeCAD is amazing. I'll gladly take it's issues over any modern software with the subscription, cloud or AI or similar bullshit.
I think the latest iteration ironed out a lot of UI issues. Not all, but a lot. If you care at all about owning your own files and designs then you basically have to use freecad.
I want to like it but it's easily the least intuitive option
I use it regularly for my 3d printer, nice simple software, but be warned it has quirks...
Still able to do 90% of the stuff I want to do
It's very quirky compared to Fusion360. If they made it at least a little bit smoother to use, at least for my tastes in CAD Software; I would be all in.
Yeah I am having too much friction getting Fusion360 to work on my Linux Mint, I know there are methods but with the registration as a hobbyist and using a container.... Got too much, you can blame me as a user not being invested enough to get it working, and installed FreeCAD from the Linux store hassle free.
The quirks I can work around, sometimes it makes me go back and redesign another iteration to avoid the quirk and then also improve my design as a bonus
I haven't had any luck with Fusion360 and bottles lately. I saw the installer once after some tinkering and the program never launched.
Granted, I've recently had all of my bottles stop working for some reason, despite not changing anything.
Yeah learning freecad was a huge pain. Hiwever it does support most things so at least the featureset is good.
Same for me. I got a 3D printer and was more interested in downloading files than creating my own. But when I got into FreeCAD it opened a world of customisation.
It took me a long time to learn and I'm still learning, like ensuring I'm constraining in a way which allows resizing later on in the design.
It has been too buggy for me to use unfortunately. Unable to select areas for pads for example.
Same for me. I want to love it, but the usability is just not there. Moving/rotating the view feels unnatural no matter what settings I used. Not being able to extrude multiple things from one sketch was a big blocker. The external reference import for sketches on an existing surface was unintuitive, slow, and fragile.
The default rotation is a god damn mess for me. I messed around with some of the options (can't remember which offhand) and it's significantly better. Trying to slice objects (can't remember the actual term) to see inside models has been the source of endless crashes though.
That's not a bug, that's how FreeCAD works. You don't select areas, you can select either the entire sketch or individual wires to Pad. Which is a different verb to Extrude.
But that genuinly didn't work too. Also there was a tutorial video that did select areas.
It's possible that was for a fork or experimental branch, I don't think it's in the standard issue.
Regardless, i also tried two separate sketsches for 2 separate bodies but that was genuinly bugging out.
I'll 100% believe that; because FreeCAD has that FOSS disease where it was designed by programmers for programmers to program, not designed for users to use. It refuses to "know what you mean" the way some other programs might.
In FreeCAD, a Body is an entity that contains exactly one contiguous shape. You cannot create a sketch with two shapes that do not intersect in any way and then Pad two separate shapes out of it. Not through the Part workflow, anyway. You have to create two separate Bodies, and then create a Sketch for each of them.
That might explain it, but i refuse to see it as my mistake, i am sure you understand. I might try that later. Thanks.
Yeah I don't either; there's no use in being one of those "GIMP is just as good as Photoshop you just don't use it right" neckbeards here; FreeCAD could be more user friendly; I've been using it for years, I've designed multiple projects in it, and I still run into things that should be simple, that it SHOULD work this way, but it doesn't, because it's not designed to be a useful tool for end users, it's designed to be a project for its programmers. Adding text to a 3D model shouldn't be as hard as it is, for example.
Some of that improved around 1.0, partially via an injection of money from the Ondsel project such as it was, and partially by some old blood leaving.
For whatever reason I just could not for the life of me get FreeCAD to work at all.
No matter what I wanted to do, it felt like it would always behave in a way I didn't expect, do nothing at all, not work like it did in tutorials, or flat out make a change that then became impossible to undo, or take me to a menu that I somehow just couldn't get out of.
I don't know if it's just me, but I had to literally give up on FreeCAD after spending hours trying and failing to make even the simplest shapes, like a cube with an indent in the middle.
It's good FreeCAD exists, but it needs a LOT of polish, especially for people who don't already have experience with tools like Fusion, and only have more rudimentary CAD experience with tools like the ones built into slicers, Tinkercad, or Onshape.
I couldn't get into fusion at all but had a bunch of (dated) solidworks experience, it worked well for me following a similar workflow I'd follow. Found it worked best to not use references to existing geometry and doing things like fillets last, I like to hand sketch first anyhow so that translates well in my experience.
Part design and sketch workbench are the way to go imo, it's gotten a lot friendlier since 1.0, I recall a lot of people liked ondsel in terms of ux, think a lot of the stuff they were doing actually ended up in 1.0, the topo naming problem is less of an issue, I'll still work around it (hence avoiding geometry references) though.
Have you tried it recently? I had good success with their tutorials. Though I sure wasn't using advanced features. And plugins were hit or miss.
I second this. Version 1.0 was only released a year ago. I gave it another try and was pleasantly surprised!
How recently? Last time I tried was early December of 2024 (version 1.0), though I suppose a lot of the tutorials I was watching were probably made on at least 1 version prior based on their release dates.
Maybe it's just a skill issue on my part 💀
I used the tutorials on the wiki in the past year.
I am starting to learn FreeCAD for a picture for a research article. I do not want to learn Inventor or any other propertiary software.
I love it. I had learned AutoCAD in college (a while ago) so FreeCAD feels natural enough. I use it for custom-designed 3d prints
The recent v1 updates were a big improvement
I've done a fair bit on TinkerCad. How does it compare?
my usability scale from most user friendly (top) to least (bottom)
- TinkerCad
- Google sketchup
- ..
- ..
- ..
- ..
- ..
- Autodesk Inventor
- Blender (CAD plugin)
- ..
- ..
- FreeCAD
I love freecad... I'm going to have to agree with your assertion
SketchUp has been owned by Trimble for over a decade, but I still think of it as Google SketchUp as well.
TinkerCad is great to teach CAD, but it suffers on important CAD features for production. It also does not make round cylinders, they are polygons. But, sometimes when modifying another model, I can use TinkerCAD where Fusion360 chokes on too many vertices.
FreeCAD is a parametric modeler, so it's closer to Inventor, Fusion360 or OnShape than TinkerCAD. FreeCAD is GPL FOSS software, so it was made by programmers for programmers to program on, not for designers to design designs in. For the most part, features aren't implemented in ways that are useful for the user, they're implemented in ways that were easy or straightforward for the developers.
No hyperbole, a functioning understanding of Python is almost a prerequisite for getting anything actually done in FreeCAD, because you'll encounter things like variable scope.
In some ways, I like how FreeCAD handles things better than some other software. FreeCAD has a spreadsheet built in, you can put your dimensions there in one place and then reference them in drawings (again, think Python variable scope. Dimensions.overall_length) and then if you need to make revisions you don't have to hunt through sketches and shit you just change the parameter. And then watch as the model explodes because they still haven't solved the topological naming problem.
Will this be suitable to do 2D architecture stuff? I was about to buy Bricscad, how does this compare?
Many Youtube tutorials:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV-nv9ygZPM
I haven't used it for that extensively, but it has different "workbenches" for different purposes and I've of those is archipack for architecture. If you give it a shot let me know how it goes since I do need to plan out some home reno work myself.
