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Comment by bacon_waffle | Hacker News Reader

As an occasional FreeCAD user and contributor, this confuses me. Are you describing writing Python scripts to create your geometry from scratch, or maybe building models out of primitive shapes and boolean operations?

My usual FreeCAD workflow involves drawing constraints-based 2D shapes in Sketcher, then extruding/revolving them. There are some numbers typed in, but those are mainly just key dimensions.

One of FreeCAD's bigger faults IMHO is that the right/best way to do things isn't easily discoverable (as seems to be common in CAD), and the documentation (like many OSS projects) is a bit hit-and-miss...

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I am a complete 3D modeling neophyte. I literally spent the last few days trying to learn FreeCAD.

Following the tutorials is a lesson in futility. The UI is clunky and small mistakes can have catastrophic outcomes for new users. Undo works in mysterious ways.

When I found myself stuck on a tutorial, a google search rewarded me with the phrase "pary designer workflow has changed substantially in 0.17." I followed a second tutorial on the wiki. Whatever eas changed - it's worse. I considered installing an older version.

Instead, I dropped FreeCAD, installed OpenSCAD, and had my part drawn in a couple hours.

When I make stuff I always have exact dimensions and positions I need to use so almost none of what I am doing can be freely drawn with the mouse. With openscad I can type in my exact values and be sure that nothing was accidentally moved by mouse.

I'd say exact dimensions are the norm for FreeCAD too - the mouse isn't used for freely drawing shapes in any workbench that I'm familiar with. With the Sketcher workbench in particular, the constraints control the geometry; the mouse is essentially used for selection and input of relationships between shapes.

For example (I've only skimmed this video, there are likely better ones), check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgstQi9jpGc

They should link these videos on their website somewhere. The first time I started FreeCAD I was completely lost(well, I'm not really a CAD expert), but some videos on YouTube explain the basics really well.

Now I find the sketching pretty intuitive, albeit a bit clunky and slow. The number one feature I'm missing is the program telling me WHAT degrees of freedom are still unconstrained in a sketch.

Same here. I've dabbled in various CAD software packages but I always come back to OpenSCAD because it lets me build a well structured text file with every detail of my model, with no possibility of hidden variables. I'm willing to give up a whole lot of features just to have that precious text file.

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