Hacker News Reader

Comment by eindiran | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a recommendation for a FOSS alternative to Fusion 360 that is (1) reasonably popular and (2) has a similar feature set?

View on HN

I've been using freecad, it's okay for the basic mechanical 3D stuff I make

the "just use fusion 360, it's free" contingent have, imo, stifled interest and support for FOSS CAD (alternately, view it as a very successful market domination move by Autodesk)

That's an interesting point. "Free" as in beer means that we will rely, and grow dependent, upon them. If they had not been giving us fish, we would have learned to fish.

Is there a word for this?

There really isn't anything. For at least a couple of years, Fusion 360 has been available for "free" (users had only community support, had to write their own POSTs for cam, etc) so as far as I know no one has been developing or considering writing anything else.

One thing that's been needed for years in the open source space is a decent mechanical CAD program and integrated CAM system.

The issue is that such things are still dark arts to write.

There are open source projects that are out there, including BRLCAD, Blender, and other special purpose programs.

Fusion 360 is head and shoulders above them in terms of usability and integration with the CAM system.

FreeCAD definitely does not have the full feature set and is still quite rough around the edges but it is improving at a remarkable pace. You still have to deal with some silly things like multiple workbenches for the same thing, lack of decent (any?) part mating support, lack of huge databases of fasteners and standards and so on, but the fundamentals are there. It's pitched as a free replacement for professionals rather than for hobbyists, but the kind of features that make hobbyist CAD software easy to use are the type of UI design that's incredibly expensive so... you get what you pay for.

Fusion 360 is a huge beast that is really ten+ applications in one.

I can't speak for all of its use-cases, but even then: I haven't found any 3D modeling software that is as easy to use & feature rich as Fusion. However, for 3D print slicing and compiling after the model has been made, Ultimaker Cura is really a gold standard in the space, and open source (AGPL3 I believe).

An often-overlooked option is Salome [0]. Although it's primarily intended as part of a pipeline for computer simulations, it's honestly about as functional as FreeCAD (with which it actually shares a lot of code, lately including the 2d constraints engine) and a good deal more stable, in my experience. I find it a good deal easier to use, and it has a few nice features such as the facility to dump your model as a Python script; the Python API is simple and very well documented.

[0] https://www.salome-platform.org/

I believe that FreeCAD is the closest you are going to get: https://freecadweb.org/

Solvespace has the parametric modeling and mill toolpath generation, but not the rest. FreeCad is closer to, but still far from, feature parity, and has a very different UI.

Is Solvespace so mature that it doesn't need updates? I see the last release was in 2016.

http://solvespace.com/index.pl

3.0 release seems pretty close

https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/issues/552#issuecom...

https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace/milestone/2

There is still plenty of development activity going on (last commit 2 days ago), I'm not sure why there hasn't been a release in so long.

https://github.com/solvespace/solvespace

Yeah, I haven't given solvespace a try yet, but it looks very promising. Its workflow is just the same as the one I was using most of the time in autodesk Inventor/Fusion/Solidworks: 2D plan, place constraints like parallelism, angles, lengths, collinear, etc. extrude. Repeat, with maybe 3D constraints in some places (coplanar etc).

The only thing I'm unsure of is if it supports some functions such as milling, threads, etc. I think interfacing it with OpenSCAD just for this use-case would be huge (define the function in OpenSCAD, apply it in solvespace).

I tried hard to use FreeCAD, but maybe not hard enough, as I really had some difficulties using that workflow (IIRC, finding the 2D planner interface was difficult enough, and constraints didn't work as expected). It did have an OpenSCAD interface, though.

The last point is something worth mentioning: an opportunity FLOSS has that proprietary software often lacks is interoperability, either with the save formats, or directly with APIs, or calling each other for specific parts. I wish this was leveraged a bit more in this space.

> The only thing I'm unsure of is if it supports some functions such as milling, threads, etc.

There's a built-in gcode generator for 3-axis milling. I've never used it, since I don't have a mill or router.

Helical features is in a development branch, and is one of the blocking features for the next release. It mostly works, but still has some open bugs.

I really like OpenJSCAD. It has the power of parametric modeling, with javascript syntax that I use most everywhere else in my technical/professional life.

Also, OpenJSCAD reads both javascript and OpenSCAD files. I've found OpenSCAD to be super useful as well -- I just don't find the modeling language to be as intuitive.

For 3d modeling you can still use it. Parametric design is not killed from the product. You just can't make simulations anymore.

If you know any college students, sometimes they can get student licenses for Solidworks or Autocad for free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com