FreeCAD
freecad.org
freecad.org
After doing the tut I can say that 1.1 is very nice, i can uninstall Fusion and Solid Edge finally :)
The guide i followed, no relation to it whatsoverer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxxDahY1U6E
Haven't used it much apart from some minor tests (I tend to prefer MoI3D, but that's in a different category in several ways...), but as far as FOSS solid modelers it seems like the most promising to me. I do remember some small UI quirks, but overall it felt very approachable and streamlined, and looking at the GitHub repo, development is active. FreeCAD IMHO is just too sprawling and complex, with seemingly little tought paid to UI/UX.
The problem with FreeCAD, on the other hand, is that it's a "just two more weeks and it'll be great" solution.
The developers are clearly talented in a raw-math kind of way, but FreeCAD offers the eternal promise of usability in the next release; while never delivering it.
Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.
This would perfectly explain why the FreeCAD experience is so consistently bizarre.
If you've been around on the FreeCAD forums, you'll see that the majority of users essentially believe that all comparisons of FreeCAD with commercial CAD software is illegitimate and become incredibly defensive. They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.
It's like they've got the Steve Jobs attitude but without the good taste that justified it.
Exactly. These FreeCAD "strategies" you mention align themselves perfectly with the objectives of the legacy CAD industry: To delay; break; and obfuscate opensource CAD.
In other words: The FreeCAD team may not be infiltrated by the legacy-CAD industry, but its behavior is entirely consistent with such a state.
One solution is to fork the behemoth; but if FreeCAD is a hedge-maze-by-design, the only way to win is not to play the game: Build alternatives elsewhere, from scratch.
FreeCAD feels like a time-drainer honeypot. Though whether by accident, or malice, is unknown.
The mindset against usability improvements that was prevalent back then has largely shifted. The hard part is the complexity of the program makes a single sweeping overhaul incredibly unlikely so incremental jumps and improvements will probably continue. Seems to me like things are headed in a pretty healthy direction when comparing the last few versions.
Has anyone tried that too?
I managed to do it (painfully) with freecad, so that's what I settled with.
Does anyone know if that's a feature yet?
Gonna check out dune3d for my next side project!
That said, pre-1.0 FreeCAD had a terrible UX so it was the best FOSS CAD option.
With the 1.0 release of FreeCAD the UX is much better though. There are still a few WTFs (e.g. it took me quite a while to figure out rollback is done via right-click->set tip, or something like that)... But overall it's better than Solvespace now.
Disclaimer: Dune 3D developer here.
EDIT: Missing fillets and chamfers we're also a big problem for me - probably I'm just a newbie maker and want unreasonable things, but still.
But I still hope for a "blender moment" where a concerted effort gets rid of old cruft, improves UI/UX and jump-starts growth (also in developers/funding) and further improvements.
It feels like all those 3D modeling apps like 3DSmax,Fusion even Zbrush share like 90% of their feature set but your are forced to literally juggle(for videogame dev at least) because of one or two arguably extremely niche capability.
Maybe, with a ton of time and effort the blender UI could be abstracted from most of the box-modeling approach and then pasted over a different paradigm, but It'd take tens of thousands of hours I imagine,.
It feels like we have been so so close to an unified 3D content creation tool kit for many years now!
Have you tried the "CAD sketcher" add-on? I think Blender should have similar functionality built-in, but for now this looks like a nice add-on.
Blender is a very very long way from being used as a general purpose CAD tool, and IMHO it should not strive to be that. But having this ability to do simple CAD designs without opening and learning a different program is cool.
If we want to bring those medium to the next level.
All major CAD systems use mature geometry kernels like Parasolid [2]. Parasolid was developed for 40 years and is still in active development. This is the piece of code that enables CAD systems to do things like computing an intersection of a G3 smooth fillet with embossed text, handling all corner cases.
FreeCAD runs on OpenCASCADE [3], which is both less sophisticated today and is slower to gain new features than Parasolid, being seemingly maintained by one person [4]. FreeCAD's geometry is hard limited by what OpenCASCADE can do.
This is the main difference from Blender. Blender ultimately operates on vertices, which doesn't require nearly the same level of inherent complexity. Blender isn't bottlenecked in what it can do like FreeCAD is.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_modeling_kernel
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology
[4]: https://github.com/Open-Cascade-SAS/OCCT/commits/master/
I think I've succeeded and many CAD tools use manifold for geometric kernels on 3d boundary meshes.
I was able to get Godot Engine and Blender to adopt elalish/manifold.
List of CAD tools that adopted elalish/manifold.
OpenSCAD Blender IFCjs Nomad Sculpt Grid.Space badcad Godot Engine OCADml Flitter BRL-CAD PolygonJS Spherene Babylon.js trimesh Gypsum Valence 3D bitbybit.dev PythonOpenSCAD Conversation AnchorSCAD Dactyl Web Configurator Arcol Bento3D SKÅPA Cadova BREP.io Otterplans Bracket Engineer
I recently had a desperate need to 3D print a part and tried FreeCAD again. A couple of things changed: 1) 1.1 came out and 2) Mango Jelly created a playlist that essentially was "bare bones what you need to know to get started." It was slightly over an hour of the fundamentals of navigating and just enough tools.
I think FreeCAD was basically just way too buggy initially, especially on macOS. Things never worked like tutorials said, or even dot updates sometimes broke what was being taught in tutorials. Also, while great, MJ's other previous videos deep dove into specific tools. Over half of any particular video would discuss features that helped you become an expert, but overwhelming when it came to getting up and running.
Since then, I've felt much more confident about FreeCAD and have used it to knock out other pieces.
His previous ones were geared for making you an expert. I remember thinking, "I'm not watching a week's worth of videos to make a hollow box with holes around it."
You can do that in FreeCAD 1.1. Select the sketch, enable "Make Internals" in the data tab. You can also enable it permanently in settings.
For example, problems like this one. Or the confusing 3D navigation (switch to Gesture or TinkerCAD mode in the Settings), or the non-interactive view cube. And many other gotchas and paper cuts that can almost all be changed with a few clicks to make it more intuitive, or just more similar to popular competition (e.g. the OpenTheme add-on gets you that Fusion look you see in many FreeCAD tutorial videos).
It's a classic pattern with long-running FOSS projects. The authors get somewhat blinded to the pain because they're used to it, plus change is difficult for the established userbase. There's also a feeling that emulating competitors is surrendering one's own identity, and the idea that some of the rough edges are justified by "the powerfulness". Thus radically changing defaults, streamlining, simplifying and even just matching user expectations is often perceived as "taking the power away" and really difficult to have the daring-do to just do. Even though on the other side of the transition a much larger and happier userbase awaits.
A lot of FOSS projects eventually do mature to the point where they can pull this off, and I think there's real signs that FreeCAD is starting to get there. The upcoming 1.1 release has a ton of modern UI catch-up, such as on-canvas gizmos, and a few good defaults changes.
There's a lot more work to do, but like others I have the feeling that FreeCAD may well be approaching its Blender/KiCAD moment. I suspect becoming a contributor right now could be good fun.
I speak from experience! We've to some extent been on a similar journey with the Plasma desktop.
To make the necessary overhaul, someone with the "power to decide" is needed, which is somewhat incompatible with unpaid open source development. I think this video about Audacity's redesign is informative in this regard:
FOSS is a doer-cracy. If you have a pain point, patch it, and it will go away.
What you say is part of the problem. It leads to "patchwork software" without a clear vision.
My guess is that they might appreciate specific criticism. It would probably help focus the work they are doing. But don't generalize them to have all the usual problems everybody else always seems to have. That isn't very helpful to anybody.
I'm not trying to blame anyone. I think this is a structural problem with FOSS projects in general (and it also applies to FreeCAD specifically).
So a more productive specific thing would perhaps be indeed to strike up a "It seems to work nicely now, why isn't it default?" convo and maybe figure out the remaining bugs.
That may be. It's just not what I'm interested in. I don't have the energy to fight lots of little battles to improve some minor things, when – in my perception – the end result would still *suck. I think a major rework is needed. For example, I don't think simply enabling "Make Internals" would be the best thing to do. IMO it should be always on AND the setting should be removed AND the toggle from the data view should be removed AND that would imply that it must always work bugfree so that nobody has a need to disable it. I don't think this is ever gonna happen if I start a discussion or even make a pull request.
* I'm not a hater, I'm a FreeCAD user. Out of all the offerings that exist, it's my preferred CAD tool for my private hobby use. I just wish it was better, because I see untapped potential.
Thanks for putting into words something I've definitely felt for a long time. It's like a junky old car with broken dash controls- you get used to having to bang on things to make them work, but if someone needs to borrow your car they're like "this is how you live!?".
I think it is unfair to say that they are "blinded to the pain". They are well aware of it from what I've seen of the Dev discussions on Discord. But the vast majority of the devs are volunteers so they can only do so much so fast. There are also some very nice usability improvements as of late that borrow from other programs, like the Solidworks-style navigation settings and the on-screen draggers for pad / pocket / transform type operations. Yes there are tons of preferences and some of the defaults might not be great, but they've added a "Search Preferences" field to help sort through them all. Then there are issues like in the link below where the discussion of how to improve FreeCAD considers comparisons with other pieces of software.
https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/issues/19440#issuecomment...
Another point I'll add is their creation of a Design Working Group to help sort through usability issues and generate a consensus for devs to subsequently implement.
I mean it more in the sense that it's very difficult to truly conceive of what a new user of the app would stumble over or dislike, if you're very used to it yourself.
Often that means small things that would not be that hard to address become invisible, because there's obvious higher priorities. Other times, things are considered small fries that actually are consistently wrong and need a holistic re-think.
One of the best things to do is to actually watch novice users use your software. This was also a big boost to the "Blender moment", when the Blender studio started inviting over artist and just watched them work in the software. This used to be really hard to do, but has now become a bit easier with screencasting and conferencing tools. I bet FreeCAD is also starting to do more of this.
Thanks for adding additional info! I forgot to mention the Design Working Group as another sign. In KDE we also set up a similar "Visual Design Group" years ago that was behind a lot of the improvements.
ex: really impressed with the direction of Audacity as an example, though I can also understand why a given community would reject such influence from a single org.
But there's also potential downsides to digging in and fixing the UI.
For instance: I've made a few simple boards with KiCAD. The first one was frustrating as hell and took forever, because my distro had helpfully installed the very latest version of KiCAD.
Meanwhile, the tutorials and videos were generally all about older versions. Which is fine, I guess, except way too many of them didn't even specify a version number.
So I (a complete newb) spent way too much time trying to find nonexistent UI widgets and being mystified that a given tutorial often seemed to be written by someone who was using different software entirely.
(The answer here is, of course, to have decent-enough official tutorials that stay in lock-step with software releases, so as to always get people started on the right page. But doing/enforcing that feels like work, and that's not usually what people want to feel when they volunteer to help write CAD software.)
this pattern could probably benefit a lot of apps
I struggled through the earlier releases and now I use OnShape because I can seamlessly switch between work and personal computers. If I ever can drop that requirement I'd love to go back to FreeCAD now that it's "good".
I dove into FreeCAD with either version 1.0.0 or earlier. It was… rough.
To be sure, it was a whole new app so I expect initial navigation around the app to be challenging. But, wow.
Nonetheless, I did get a few things modeled up [1]. And for that I have to thank LLMs for steering me through using the app. I suggest others to try an LLM as a guide if you are learning (and I still am learning, of course). I like tutorials, but so often you can spend hours watching tutorials that cover all manner of ground where you simply want to complete a specific task—unable to find the tutorial covering how to do it.
Having said that though, I am eager to try this 1.0.2 version. (I'm also eager to fix a few minor MacOS-specific nits that I've already seen.)
[1] https://engineersneedart.com/blog/3dprinting2025/3dprinting2...
And the tutorial by Mango Jelly Solutions on YouTube are fantastic. They are generally very focused on one particular task per video so I think you'd find them really useful.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. The concepts are very transferrable.
At work I used to use SolidWorks exclusively, now I'm using Onshape and will probably switch to Inventor soon. At home I typically use Fusion 360. They all work more-or-less the same and moving between them isn't too hard.
[1]: https://www.solidworks.com/solution/solidworks-makers
[2]: https://www.printables.com/model/1490911-g0-g3-corners-visua...
[3]: https://www.autodesk.com/uk/products/fusion-360/design-exten...
It sounds like Solidworks is better for someone who is always using it—I maybe use a 3D CAD tool two or three weeks out of the year. Rent-anxiety (paying for it but not using it) keeps me from subscription apps.
One is cloud based one is local install. They are pushing cloud based one because, their local installer is really bad (it's also bad for commercial version, people often joked, that the hardest thing about SW is getting it to run)
But yes, you pay yearly subscription. Which I am not a fan of, but it's a decent price, and I understand that such niche programs, can't sustain themselves on volume
They are saying "we are expending countries" but i check once in a while and hasn't changed in years.
I found this command palette that helped me discover the different commands and actually get to (beginner) proficient.[0].
Again, no relation, but it's what made it stick for me after a few aborted learning attempts. (and I had a lot of fun with freecad! Especially by my second or third model where I could actually just sit down and start modelling without having to learn any extra things. Now I just need an excuse to find something else to model...)
I feel like most of the opinions about FreeCAD online are out of date, since at least 1.0 if not later.
I mainly use it for planning things to make out of wood or print out of plastic.
Unrelated to part modeling, I would love to have a browser based roadway design tool that is domain-first, CAD second. Autodesk and Bentley are trying to be less bad, but their solutions create an extremely high administrative burden and unreasonable costs. Oh, if I just have someone working full-time for a month preparing files to be federated on your cloud platform I can finally get clash detection? I mean, shouldn’t that be table stakes for the software you are already being asked to buy over again every single year?
Plasticity looks great, but it focuses on visual modeling instead of constraint based modeling. It's not a general purpose CAD tool.
The fact that it crashed on me for everything and nothing all at once seemed a bigger problem than "complexity".
I’m an CAD hobbyist, and I’ve tried to work with FreeCAD multiple times over past years, always failing….
…until I saw this video and learned about version 1.1:
FreeCAD is now in the same ballpark of capability and usability as Solidworks. It can still be a bit clunky and frustrating sometimes, but then so can most CAD programs, in their own ways.
Side note: the creator of the video above also has a video on optimising the FreeCAD interface. (There are some frustrations related to the interface generally, and this would seem to be a low hanging fruit for the FreeCAD team to address.)
I have, like, an old married couple relationship with SolidWorks. Stockholm syndrome may be more accurate. It shaped how I think, it aggravates me as only a long-time companion could, but overall I'm fond of it.
It gives me hope that others have made the switch. I've wanted to love FreeCAD for a long time, too.
And it’s now helpful to remind myself, each time I find FreeCAD difficult or clunky, of all of those times that Solidworks was also, just in different ways. Or the time that Fusion lost a whole part of a model. Or the lack of a parametric history in lots of other competitors. Or the awfulness of trying to refer to specific parts of a model in progress of OpenSCAD. And so on…
It really sped up learning for me. (because I'd know what the thing I wanted was called, but couldn't find them, and having to google and search before every click is... not fun)
This time everything just installed, and Claude Code turned out to be pretty good. Designing with code is sometimes more work upfront, but iteration is so much better. You get proper abstractions: functions, encapsulation, loops. You can drop in a SAT solver to optimize part placement or grab data from an excel sheet. No more clicking through a GUI that crashes and loses your session. I've spent time with Fusion, SolidWorks, NX, OnShape, FreeCAD, and Rhino, and each has its merits, but none of them can benefit from the LLM revolution the way a code-first tool can.
I asked Claude Code to generate a set of Lego bricks in various sizes, apply a nice color palette, and pack them optimally into a grid. It needed some steering, but all in all I was impressed
also worth a look: build123d
https://github.com/jopdorp/build123d-freecad (it also supports cadquery)
Set it up today and I am really liking build123d in general. I've always wanted something code-based for CAD and I can't believe I missed something this promising.
Frankly even the visualization tools that you can plugin like OCP Cad viewer mean that outside of complex assemblies you can do everything in your editor of choice.
It seems like it's fully community-maintained, there is no big company or foundation behind it. Honestly it's hard to believe!
There was just one major problem, the infamous "topological naming problem" which caused issues downstream is you edited a non-leaf node. That was pretty frustrating to deal with, but in later releases they fixed it I think. (Have not tried it since because I didn't have anything to model)
I don't know much about the internal architecture of FreeCAD. As far as I know, FreeCAD does a lot of heavy lifting including managing TNP. It's supposed to be handled by the CAD kernel - OpenCASCADE in this case. I suspect that the reason why open source CAD lags behind their proprietary counterparts is really the CAD kernel. Many proprietary CAD software share the same kernel, in fact. For example, SolidWorks, Solid Edge and OnShape use Parasolid. It tells you how critical the kernel is.
Perhaps we should be focusing more on a more capable open source CAD kernel. There are a few projects around that are trying this. But they either have very limited scopes, or don't have enough support and momentum.
Maybe then they'll notice that without Open Source training data it won't be able to solve the problem.
Then again, the success of such a project might depend on other factors. Given the complexity of the task, I can imagine that just "lucking into" the right design decisions early on could have a major impact.
Not least there are free (as in beer) solutions available, like fusion 360, that are enormously capable.
Theres certainly a place for open source, and openscad would be a great tool to reach for for procedurally generated models. But in all honesty, Freecad doesn't compare well to the professional tools in this space - not in the way that say, gimp does to its commercial competitors.
The current AutoCAD GUI is essentially unchanged from the 80s, so this shouldn't really be much of an issue. They added a ribbon probably 15 years ago at this point, but I can't think of any other major/recent changes. (But maybe there are some changes that I'm not familiar with, since I don't use AutoCAD very often and only started using it relatively recently)
Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.
There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it. On the other hand, a single developer, in javascript, made a copy of photoshop, and most people I know prefer to use that over GIMP...
Just copy the UI that works, if you can't research your own UI.
For whatever reason, the FreeCAD community is explicitly against taking note from competitors. Copying the UI of the leader is a thoughtcrime.
Popular opinions take ages to shift sadly.
And that is without having to edit the text in case you made a tipo.
Now, if we are talking about doing batch image editing in python. Gimp us the best tool I've found.
PS: I've still not managed to learn Blender, not put enough hours in, it is a hugely complex beast of a program that basically requires keyboard shortcut use imho. That interface (beautiful as it is) has so many options that even if I know what I'm looking for I can't find it!
[1] https://www.abebooks.com/Blender-Book-Carsten-Wartmann-Starc...
Great alternative in-browser.
It makes me want to investigate that style of application.
I think it even works offline.
Which is something I find odd that so many people seem to assume GIMP as the de-facto open source photoshop alternative when Krita is more analogous and much easier to use.
The issue with this scad file is that I built the geometry up with no functions. I tried and failed to get them working so I just pushed through, so now it is mind melting to try to refactor it. I'm hoping to one day melt a mechanical mind to get it done. Until then, it's a fun challenge prompt for these models.
concur otherwise that openscad is parameter friendly. the lightbulb moment for me was when i finally grasped its functional grammar and leaned into it, esp recursion instead of algebraic solutions. that should probably be the subject of a tutorial or several.
Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint. You can push either kernel to its limits if you try hard enough, but OCC hits that ceiling much sooner. So any CAD tool built on top of it inherits that ceiling too.
The thing you are complaining about is the immediate dismissal the forum used to shoot back at people with ideas. Most likely a conditioned (and very toxic) response from receiving a lot of equally non-constructive feedback using things like F360 as their litmus.
Either way, there is the Design Working Group which evaluates ideas and feedback with a fair lens about what will work in context of FreeCAD and what is feasible to implement without causing unnecessary disruption to existing users. It is a complex social paradox to deal with.
A long time ago I interviewed at one of the large CAD companies. I remember getting an office tour and the person showing me around pointed into a corner with six desks and said "that is the team that does fillets".
Open source tools can handle some cases, but to handle the full complexity of real world problems is a huge extra step that I doubt they will manage any time soon.
Many such cases, not only in CAD area. Good non-dev FOSS software is exception, not a rule, and these exceptions pretty often have some corporate backing and are not purely community-driven. And even for dev tools there are proprietary offerings that are light-years ahead of anything FOSS, though people here are never going to admit it, as TTY clone running vi clone is supposedly all you need.
I don't state this with satisfaction, quite the opposite, but it is long since I became disillusioned.
They don't start with "how do users want this to operate?" They start with a weekend of coding, applying their preconceived notions, a library of fancy algorithms that are not directly motivated by an actual feature, and they go from there. This does not lead to a good product, as in something that could earn you money on an open market. It only prevails, in spite of nobody wanting to pay for it, because they give it away for free, and they sink their own "disposable time" (and maybe even income) into the project.
Personal Context: I am a civil enginer, and our requirement from CAD softwares are a lot simpler than Mechanical Engineering. Here on HN, whenever I see people discussing CAD, its the mechanical version of parts and 3d printing.
Shameless Plug: I have decided to try building my own! Over a long enough timeline, it is doable, including the UI/UX part.
Think of I beams, all major countries have national standards of shapes and sizes. There are many "devil in detail" nuances.
So, giving it a go myself. If not for others, at least for my own itch. This is one aspect of open source.
Finding Cadquery less of a hurdle for casual use. Wish I could run it from Termux though.
Speaking of KiCad, I am convincing lots of people to move from EAGLE to it now that EAGLE is about to be killed by AutoDesk, and everyone seem to be having a good time.
I am hoping FreeCAD can become good to the point I can convince people to move to it too.
I would kill for something like KiCad with more refined controls.
FreeCAD may also be good - it's the only other one I haven't tried.
On the other hand if you're convincing EAGLE users to move they'll probably be happy with KiCAD because they're already used to an even worse UX, as if such a thing were possible.
Got any specific pain points for KiCad?
I am not sad to see it go. The only ones I know of who used to use EAGLE were those who got hooked on it when it was either free or the cheapest option for hobbyists and small businesses. It didn't win any UI/UX competitions, certainly not against the joy that is modern programs for solid CAD.
But once I did (on commercial software), switching to Freecad really wasn't that bad.
My only gripe with FreeCAD is that the program runs on a single CPU core as far as I can tell and it's easy to lock up the program for multiple seconds if you do too complex of an operation. This isn't usually an issue for me though.
- colorise solid faces with random colors
- colorise faces by type (cylinder, plane, etc.)
- add 3D labels in the scene
I can't compare to any of the paid competitors as I've not used those, but in my opinion FreeCAD is slightly disappointing when it comes to UI, bugs and stability.
It's fine for simple stuff, but man, it can be frustrating to work with especially when working on something more complicated then running into random bugs or application crashes.
It's a great project though and very powerful.
If you are going to experiment with FreeCAD, I highly, highly recommend starting by learning about parametric modelling. Define everything in the spreadsheet, and relate all of the sizes to each other.
If you don't, it will be a very frustrating experience when you realize halfway into your design that some earlier piece needs to be tweaked, and your whole model falls apart.
I spent 2 days crash coursing freeCAD (this is with a general understanding of the theory of 3D design already) to try and make an adapter plate for my car. A plate with 6 holes in precise spots and tapped. It was absolutely brutal and after the first 3D print trial had the a couple holes misaligned, I trashed freecad got the free fusion360.
No shit, in 20 minutes I had made the exact part I needed. The program actually worked the way you would expect. I didn't even need a tutorial it was so intuitive. Even if I hadn't spent the previous 2 days getting bent by freecad, I'm pretty sure it would have taken me only an hour max with a blank slate mind in fusion.
Now I'm getting angry writing this. If the FreeCAD guys see this, thanks for the hard work, but understand your minds must work completely differently than even the average engineers.
So then I looked for free student versions of commercial software. They had a clear UI and UX, clear tutorials. It was a joy to model the parts I needed.
If I needed 3D modeling for engineering in the future, I would absolutely pay for a commercial program. FreeCAD was simply no competition. I don't know if it is now. Nor do I have any motivation whatsoever to even bother to give it another look.
If I need a license for hobbyist purposes, I'm sure some of the commercial offerings are happy to give me one for free because that would translate into commerce for them if I ever needed it professionally.
https://magazine.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad
for the new UI --- any word on that? (Just an annotated copy would be great)
Apparently, one of the devs from Ondsel has done a soft-fork and is stumping for funding:
(but he wasn't interested in the feature I want, see below)
That said, I managed to make it through the tutorial for Dune 3D twice now (after a fashion), and I think that the tutorial needs to do a better job of explaining concepts from first principles: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/118 and https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/252 c.f., my own attempt to explain the commercial CAD/CAM software which a company I work for sells/supports: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing --- is there a really good book which explains fundamental 3D CAD concepts and terminology?
I'm way more successful w/ OpenSCAD (usually by way of BlockSCAD: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ or https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor) and the available printed books help a lot, though I've been using the new Python integrated version:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
The thing which would really help me in FreeCAD would be having a graphical programming workbench as a first-class citizen, something like Grasshopper for Rhino3D, or the node editor in Moment of Inspiration 3D, or Dynamo as used for AutoDesk software --- any word on that?
I also am not a fan of the icon-only toolbars and so I always use this plugin: https://github.com/APEbbers/FreeCAD-Ribbon
IMO it's a big improvement (I have it configured to only show small sized icons with labels) but then again I know not everyone is a fan of this type of toolbar because of the amount of screen space it takes up.
Designing 3D parts is hard enough, and while parametric modeling has uses... come on.
I would love to go back to FreeCAD, but for now I'm using Onshape (I run Linux, so Fusion isn't an option).
As I understand it, there are no other open source alternatives around. On the commercial side there are some, perhaps the foremost being the venerable Parasolid, which is used by Onshape, Solid Edge, Solid Works, Siemens NX, Shapr 3d and others.
Creating a solid 3d kernel is hard. Parasolid is from 1986.
These are almost all caused because they use Open Cascade under the hood
I'm guessing you're trying to set a fillet which would completely consume one of the faces adjacent to the edge being filleted. In these cases I've found that a workaround is to make the fillet 0.001mm smaller than the size which would consume the entire face. You end up with a very very small amount of flat area but it's so small it doesn't show up during machining or 3d printing.
The workaround mentioned isn't a magic solution, it fails in a bunch of more complex cases too. Chamfers are a complicated operation and predicting valid values across of the operation in order to set a maximum value is, as far as I'm aware, in a similar region of difficulty. It would also be unfeasible in many cases to attempt the actual operation across a wide range of values. It's not so much a choice as just being hard to do.
* This needs a better renderer in today's day & age
* Need cross-device/web support
* Topology Optimization w/ pure physics code
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Hopefully LLMs can work on forking this or adding better features with AI-assists