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Comment by haberman | Hacker News Reader

The more awesome Blender gets, the more jealous I am that it's not designed for CAD.

I keep wondering if FreeCAD will eventually make these kinds of strides, or if it's better to try getting Blender to do CAD-likes stuff. I know there is a bit of CAM-like stuff floating around for Blender. But I'm always afraid that this will come up short in the long run, due to Blender's fundamentally mesh-based nature.

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The more awesome Blender gets, the more jealous I am that it's not designed for CAD.

You may be interested in this: https://blenderartists.org/t/geometry-sketcher-constraint-so...

Someone implemented sketching in blender using the geometric constraint solver borrowed from Solvespace. It is also notable that the same solver has been used in FreeCADs assembly 3 workbench.

For the next Solvespace (3.1) release we have replaced the homegrown matrix operations in the solver with Eigen. In some sketches this seems be running 8-10x faster.

Solvespace is amazing, I have been using it all day. Looking forward to trying out the blender plugin!

I really hope so, but I wouldn't count on it... in my view, FreeCAD seems to be suffering from certain stagnation -similar to GIMP's a decade ago.

The "triangle of uses" of Blender/FreeCAD/OpenSCAD has a weird void in the middle to fill ...and seeing how Blender keeps growing, I'd imagine it'd be the first covering most of it. It may be argued that it's already doing so in many ways, via plugins and Blender's Python API.

You know, it wasn't long ago that Blender was a somewhat obscure open source CG/3D modeling software that was not taken super seriously for enterprise use. Blender has been around for a really long time, and there has always been a community of users and developers who improved the software over the years. Eventually it hit some sort of critical mass where it got good enough, and attracted enough attention and funding to accelerate the development (I like to think this was the 2.8 release.) This started a positive feedback cycle where it got better, attracted more attention and funding, thus improving and polishing it even further to the point where it's sponsored by practically every major tech company, and taken seriously when compared to commercial software.

So I like to think that there's hope for FreeCAD or something similar. Especially when considering how the 3D printing/maker community has become increasingly prominent. There's definitely demand for open source 3D CAD and a passionate and capable community of makers willing to make that happen. But this type of software isn't built, refined, and polished overnight.

While it's not really a tool for precision modelling you can get the objects to real world size by setting the coordinate space and units to your scale. I've modelled the house I'm building in Blender, put it on a real scale and size plot of land oriented against true north. There's even a built in plugin to model sun position based on time and coordinates, it's been mind blowing to be able to see how the shades will change through the windows and how another building will (or not) block the sun during different months.

I've tried FreeCAD for precision modelling like house plans but it was just painful to use, especially compared to AutoCAD which is super good and the snapping is unlike anything I've seen, but sadly prohibitively expensive for non professional use. Their cheapest plan is something like $200/mo.

I’m trying to do something myself but modelling an existing building. I just get really confused on the “right way” too use these tools. For example, on a log building do I model the logs or some flat wall with a texture, etc?

The best way to proceed is to think in terms of placeholders. Make the wall simple now; then imagine how you want to detail it, and proceed with the understanding that you'll want to replace it at some point, and then it's just a matter of setting up the organization of your objects so that that can be done gracefully. If you don't have a particular requirement like presentation in a game engine, you don't have to aim for it to be optimized and can do something like making a detailed sculpt for every log. If you do have that requirement there's still often a reason to push off the optimization to a final step, because it might involve destructive workflows where you essentially turn your initial detailed asset into a reference for the optimized one(e.g. baking a normal map).

As long as you expect everything to be done in two or three iterations and split out the work appropriately, you won't be stuck for too long.

Thanks. I suppose as long as i am creating a wall in isolation, i can always easily replace it.

As a graduating Engineering student that is about to lose access to some really powerful and incredibly expensive CAD software I can't agree enough. I think I just need to say goodbye to parametric modelling and embrace Blender.

I recommend giving Fusion 360 a try before you switch to mesh modeling. You lose so much when you leave parametric behind if you want to do anything practical for hardware / manufacturing or even 3D printing.

I've used Fusion 360 pretty extensively. It is pretty buggy and has performance issues especially for even small assemblies. I also worry that with Autodesk moving towards ridiculous pricing that I'll lose access to everything I've made eventually. Its fine for now for small 3D printing projects but I don't think I would start any major projects using it.

It may not be at the level of dedicated CAD software, but I found this YouTube channel teaching how to narrow the gap considerably. https://youtube.com/c/MakerTales

FreeCAD's stable release is somewhat painful to use, but I'd say that when using a development build (I've personally had no trouble) and having gone through the preferences, customization options, and list of addons (altogether not too much effort ⇒ would recommend), it becomes truly competitive with the other major alternative, the free-as-in-beer tier of less-than-industry-standard Fusion 360. AutoDesk made an effective move, though, and Fusion's capture of the hobbyist market has stifled FOSS development.

FreeCAD's most serious drawback, the topological naming problem (TNP), is remedied in RealThunder's branch [0] (confusingly also called the RT branch, assembly3 branch, Link Branch, and LinkStage3). Many of the smaller features it includes will also be in the imminent upcoming release (0.20); sadly, the TNP fix has only been weakly promised for 0.21. FreeCAD's other crucial issue is the lack of official assembly support. There are four competing addons; RealThunder's branch includes his, Assembly3.

I often feel that 'bad' UI (especially in free software) is perfectly productive once the user is familiar, but I will admit that difference in aesthetics in FreeCAD from switching themes, tweaking settings, and rearranging toolbars/panels is not small. I'm not sure of the authorship of each, but UI improvements in RealThunder's branch include animated camera snapping and panel autohide/transparency. A FreeCAD idiosyncrasy is the drop-down list for workbench switching, which is not ideal. It is a good example of the flexibility often seen in FOSS software: replace the list with the tab bar addon, custom keyboard shortcuts, or one of two compatible pie menu implementations. The Pie Menu addon can contextually vary from the types of selected objects; the pie menu in RealThunder's branch can be both global and per-workbench.

FreeCAD's keyboard shortcuts are standard, though I'll express a peeve I have with almost all software where one hand goes on the keyboard and another on the mouse: shortcuts arranged mnemonically and thus spread across the keyboard ease learning but are terrible for skilled use. I mean, if I have to hunt with one hand for a key under my desk, I might as well use the toolbar/menustrip/ribbon! Blender does seem to be an exception, though. Seems like the otherscould take a hint from PC games (notably MOBAs).

[0] https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD_assembly3/releases Seems to require a side-by-side release installation for dependencies. I also had to fiddle with MSVC.

When I was auditioning different CAD programs a while ago, I tried a few different tutorials for FreeCAD and hit the hurdle that there were several different modules in which to start a sketch, but of which none offered a full set of functionality. Of course, the different tutorials used different starting points.

Was my impression correct; and is this something that is being addressed?

I keep growing more impressed by FreeCAD. At the moment some of the most critical usability improvements are still in development branches though.

i just discovered the FreeCAD addon repository and parts libraries: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/External_workbenches

There's lots of great tools there!

The RealThunder development branch fixes one of FreeCAD's main weaknesses -- the topological naming problem, and is worth checking out as well.

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