I hope to have one of these articles about FreeCAD one day. Maybe the stakes are lower for movies than engineering and that's why it hasn't happened yet.
- No built-in assembly workbench. If you create more than 1 object, there is no way to align/attach them together. There are several competing, incompatible, and buggy plugins.
- Topological naming problem is way worse than in paid CAD software. It's very difficult to edit old constraints without breaking new actions as they're replayed: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Topological_naming_problem
- Software dependencies are not included. Essential features like viewing the dependency graph (to unbreak your model; See above) are broken out of the box. You have to manually install specific versions of tools like graphviz (no, not the same version used by all the other software on your system) to unbreak these features first. Same goes for rendering images, exporting to some formats, using some mesh generators, etc. You really get the full "linux desktop" experience even if you are not on linux ;)
This is the single, number one, absolute must fix problem in FreeCAD. All other FreeCAD work should stop until this gets fixed. Period.
Broken constraints were bad enough, but as an amateur I could live with them. However, every now and then the system would renumber and reconnect constraints wrongly. That's just not acceptable and should never happen.
Until FreeCAD fixes this not only can't I recommend it but I have to give anti-recommendations to stay far, far away from it. That pains me greatly as FreeCAD is the only piece of open-source software I have ever had to chase people away from.
Ha ha that's exactly what would happen if FreeCAD was a company and had a product manager, but it's very unlikely that would happen organically.
Maybe some day a megacorp will get so pissed off by solidworks licensing that they fork FreeCAD, rewrite opencascade, fix the high priority bugs, and release code+binaries out of spite. A man can dream.
Things have gotten better, but filesystems still drop errors.
I really doubt that has much to do with it. The Blender team has been working the hardest on creating sustainable funding, that is the major difference. Blender’s “Get Involved” link takes you to the Blender Foundation page, which is a business entity setup and devoted to funding Blender. FreeCAD’s “Get Involved” link takes you to GitHub. The Blender site lists paid jobs, and has a one-click donate button highlighted with monthly corporate level sponsorships listed, where FreeCAD’s has only a single $5 suggestion behind a menu. There’s a further link to a list on a wiki of a couple more ways to sponsor FreeCAD, but you can feel the difference in scale just browsing the two sites. Blender got started ~8 years ahead of FreeCAD, so yeah maybe if FreeCAD focuses on growing a business model they can get there too. The Blender Foundation was launched about 20 years ago though, and it seems like it look a looong time to get the real traction they seem to have now.
I really really want an OSS alternative to Fusion/etc but FreeCAD needs a lot of work before it’ll even come close.
It's only a few years since we used to hear regular reports of people really struggling with the Blender UI too. It's great to see the improvements to Blender now paying off.
I think there's a fairly good chance that the devs aren't aware of all the rough edges or quirky choices in the same way that a power user of another CAD system would be.
(My own personal CAD experience is so dated at this point as to be pretty useless. I learnt on Unigraphics on a Sun workstation way back in the mists of time but have forget almost everything about it.)
At least this is what I seen 5-7 years ago, gave up very quickly struggling with it - a software supposed to make things easier, not more complex, and FreeCAD made things unnecessarily difficult and complicated. Maybe I should look at it again now, hopefully things improved.
(I am trying to avoid using Fusion 360, which has a much more streamlined experience)
Blender on the other hand is very solid in the modeling department, in my experience. The mesh based approach certainly helps, but not depending on an external organization for the core geometry functionality does not hurt either.
I've been wondering what portion of the FreeCAD "problems" people report are actually issues with OpenCascade. I don't have time to deal with any of it, just a question that pops into my head when I see complaints about FreeCAD. When I have time I spend it in Solvespace, which is decades behind commercial CAD but is so much more fun.
The only way I could see it happening is if a consortium of large companies decided that they wanted to drop the big players and build an open source one. It needs a visionary in the position to decide to do it.
There are many issues with FreeCAD being OSS alternative to professional MCAD software, but UI/UX is not one of them