Unfortunately, FreeCAD has some serious functional problems in my experience. I use CAD to make models for 3d printing, and with basically any other option I can make parts significantly faster and better. Also, I have never had an issue with another parametric modeler going back to change a dimension somewhere and it breaking the entire rest of the part, but conversely in FreeCAD I have never had that actually work. It is a complete mind fuck to finish printing a part, find out you got a dimension slightly wrong, and then having to basically start the entire fucking design process over because changing that dimension in FreeCAD just throws a bunch of errors and won’t show you a part anymore.
No, I am not a CAD expert, and I get that. But I can functionally use every other CAD software I have had the opportunity to use (I don’t count Blender for this, there are janky addons but that isn’t what Blender is). FreeCAD is near enough unusable. And anytime people bring up its shortcomings anywhere in the FreeCAD community, they get shit on for not doing CAD correctly, told that FreeCAD is exactly how it should be, and actually you are wrong for wanting it to be any different. I’ve spent countless hours trying to learn how FreeCAD wants me to operate, more than I’d ever spent learning Fusion360, and I still can’t get it to do what I would consider to be the bare minimum.
I think I’ve seen somewhere that you should set up reference values or something so that you can change parameters on the fly without breaking anything, which is insane to need to have to do that to avoid running into the ‘topological naming issue’ that magically no other package had a problem with. I’ve basically stopped using filets and chamfers because those will just destroy any chance I can update anything on the model later on.
The community really is brutal too. I remember reading someone getting taken down because they were asking how to extrude instead of pad while they were on the ‘part design’ workbench
It seems that you have only used Pre-1.0/1.1 FreeCAD from your description.
I have done some pretty complex designs with it, but the topological naming problem was really bad then.
It has improved greatly, has good defaults now, and I have yet to have any sort of crash at all and so far.
Sure, not perfect, nor even “great” and without all of the quality of life tools as F360, but it also doesn’t bend you over like F360 does. Development has sped up a ton in the past couple years too. I am hoping it is on par with what F360 was before enshittification in 5 years or so.
Sadly, F360 has been spiraling downhill for a while. Everyone who uses it a lot (and especially professionally) is complaining how terribly slow and buggy it is and gets worse with every update. Apparently rampant memory leak crashes, calculation crashes, and skyrocketing prices.
I have definitely used it post 1.0, not 1.1 since that just released in March of this year though. I have a hard time believing they have fixed all the issues I have with it between 1.0 and 1.1. I would love to see it get better, but unfortunately I just don’t have a lot of hope without significant changes made to detoxify the community. To me it is one of those “the first step is admitting you have a problem” situations, and so far they seem unwilling.
As for F360 going downhill, not in a way I notice as a hobbyist (other than making it much harder to install under wine recently…). That said, I only use F360 because they have a free for hobbyist/makers option. Most everyone I know that uses CAD professionally use Solidworks (outside of YouTubers that seem to be getting paid by Autodesk occasionally), so I have long assumed F360 isn’t “the best” option, just the one that I could reach.
True, many many companies have solid works because they invest heavily in marketing to universities, but holy shit it is slow, horrible, buggy, and crashes a ton, but it has a good ecosystem with Altium for mechanical+ electrical design so companies get locked in. It is all about marketing.
Creo (I think that was it) is really the way to go. Like FreeCAD, it is not very intuitive, but it can handle assemblies that would send solid works and inventor into the depths of error and lagging hell.
Unfortunately, FreeCAD has some serious functional problems in my experience. I use CAD to make models for 3d printing, and with basically any other option I can make parts significantly faster and better. Also, I have never had an issue with another parametric modeler going back to change a dimension somewhere and it breaking the entire rest of the part, but conversely in FreeCAD I have never had that actually work. It is a complete mind fuck to finish printing a part, find out you got a dimension slightly wrong, and then having to basically start the entire fucking design process over because changing that dimension in FreeCAD just throws a bunch of errors and won’t show you a part anymore.
No, I am not a CAD expert, and I get that. But I can functionally use every other CAD software I have had the opportunity to use (I don’t count Blender for this, there are janky addons but that isn’t what Blender is). FreeCAD is near enough unusable. And anytime people bring up its shortcomings anywhere in the FreeCAD community, they get shit on for not doing CAD correctly, told that FreeCAD is exactly how it should be, and actually you are wrong for wanting it to be any different. I’ve spent countless hours trying to learn how FreeCAD wants me to operate, more than I’d ever spent learning Fusion360, and I still can’t get it to do what I would consider to be the bare minimum.
I think I’ve seen somewhere that you should set up reference values or something so that you can change parameters on the fly without breaking anything, which is insane to need to have to do that to avoid running into the ‘topological naming issue’ that magically no other package had a problem with. I’ve basically stopped using filets and chamfers because those will just destroy any chance I can update anything on the model later on.
The community really is brutal too. I remember reading someone getting taken down because they were asking how to extrude instead of pad while they were on the ‘part design’ workbench
Why are those even two different things at all?!
It seems that you have only used Pre-1.0/1.1 FreeCAD from your description.
I have done some pretty complex designs with it, but the topological naming problem was really bad then.
It has improved greatly, has good defaults now, and I have yet to have any sort of crash at all and so far.
Sure, not perfect, nor even “great” and without all of the quality of life tools as F360, but it also doesn’t bend you over like F360 does. Development has sped up a ton in the past couple years too. I am hoping it is on par with what F360 was before enshittification in 5 years or so.
Sadly, F360 has been spiraling downhill for a while. Everyone who uses it a lot (and especially professionally) is complaining how terribly slow and buggy it is and gets worse with every update. Apparently rampant memory leak crashes, calculation crashes, and skyrocketing prices.
I have definitely used it post 1.0, not 1.1 since that just released in March of this year though. I have a hard time believing they have fixed all the issues I have with it between 1.0 and 1.1. I would love to see it get better, but unfortunately I just don’t have a lot of hope without significant changes made to detoxify the community. To me it is one of those “the first step is admitting you have a problem” situations, and so far they seem unwilling.
As for F360 going downhill, not in a way I notice as a hobbyist (other than making it much harder to install under wine recently…). That said, I only use F360 because they have a free for hobbyist/makers option. Most everyone I know that uses CAD professionally use Solidworks (outside of YouTubers that seem to be getting paid by Autodesk occasionally), so I have long assumed F360 isn’t “the best” option, just the one that I could reach.
True, many many companies have solid works because they invest heavily in marketing to universities, but holy shit it is slow, horrible, buggy, and crashes a ton, but it has a good ecosystem with Altium for mechanical+ electrical design so companies get locked in. It is all about marketing.
Creo (I think that was it) is really the way to go. Like FreeCAD, it is not very intuitive, but it can handle assemblies that would send solid works and inventor into the depths of error and lagging hell.