Recently I’ve been having feelings about moving away from Fusion 360. The combination of cloud app / filesystem and their demonstrated willingness to remove features and add arbitrary limitations (eg. 10 editable model limit) makes me feel uneasy about using it. To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it. If you’ve ever rented a house you’ll know the feeling - you quite don’t feel like it’s really your home, if the landlord wants to make renovate or redecorate you don’t have any choice and you could be evicted at any moment.
So I tried FreeCAD. At first, I have to say that it felt a little like stepping out of a spaceship (Fusion) and banging rocks together like a caveman. It’s not that you can’t do (most) of the same things as an enterprise CAD package, but the killer feature of Fusion is the level of intuitiveness and “it just works” that makes FreeCAD seem like trying to write Latin.
After a week of on-and-off learning I was not sure I wanted to continue. Even after getting comfortable with the basics, frustration levels would spike to 11 sometimes. The main issue I kept running into was that altering a previous feature would break everything that came after, requiring a varying amount of work to fix. The FreeCAD wiki suggests ways to mitigate this but many of them are un-intuitive and/or inconvenient. After some googling this seems to be caused by a pretty difficult to solve issue called the “Topological Naming Problem” (where FreeCAD can’t keep track of surfaces / edges / vertexes in a stable fashion when features are changed). Then I came across this blog post that pointed out a fix has actually been developed earlier this year. A developer by the name of RealThunder has created a fork of FreeCAD called “Link Branch” which can track topology in a (more) stable fashion.
I tried this branch and was blown away by how much more usable it is. Not only can it handle changes to past features almost perfectly, but I can create multiple bodies from a single sketch (not possible before) and there are other UI tweaks that make creating features easier such as the ability to preview fillets and chamfers at the same time as selecting their edges. I’m not totally sure which of these features are unique to Link branch vs which might be pre-release in the main branch, but certainly the topology naming fix is unique to Link.
So if you have tried FreeCAD in the past and been frustrated, or if Fusion’s past free license changes or price increases are making you uneasy, give the Link Branch a try! Downloads are available in the releases page.
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the biggest turn off of freecad to me was the usability. It felt clunky, and frankly, it didn’t give the ability to follow my normal work flow. definitly going to give this a try, thank you.
I won’t say that FreeCAD has a good UX, but it helps a lot NOT to look at it as a CAD software, but as a collection of specialized engineering tools, organized into workspaces, haphazardly put together.
First thing you need to know is which workspace you’ll need, and FreeCAD does a terrible job at explaining you that (the concept of workspaces isn’t self explanatory) AND describing what each and every one of them does. Some of which should just be disabled by default because of how fringe, unpolished or unreliable they are.
Once you’ve got that part cleared, you can learn the primitives and the jargon (what’s a body, solid, part, mesh, element, …), not great, but fair. Then, you have to learn, for every workbench, what their workflow is (e.g. create a body, create a sketch, apply transformations ; Create an analysis, define material, define loads, add a mesh, add solver, add equations, run solver, add results, tweak the pipeline so it renders, show results), and yep, FreeCAD won’t hold your hand for any of that, you’ll have to wear your explorer hat and navigate from frustration to incomprehension until it accidentally works.
But then, if you can get over that, you’ll end-up with a tool that’s more powerful and versatile than anything else, including dandy commercial offerings. It still blows my mind that nowadays anyone in their garage can do for free what not so long ago would require a full engineering curriculum and corporate sponsorship to acquire licenses. My hope is that FreeCAD would gain the same kind of visibility that Blender enjoys, with sufficient funds for a small dev team and a great product manager.
FreeCAD could do with a massive UX overhaul and a workflow that people could use without having to relearn how to invent the wheel. The underpinnings of the software are good. They’ve done a lot of good work there. But as far as a usable piece of software, something like Blender – with a lot more complexity, and a lot more individual toolsets (2D Animation, Video Editing, VFX, Sculpting, Poly Modeling, Bone Rigging, Scripting – ALL with entire workflows associated with them) – has managed to be a wildly usable solution despite many of its individual subsystems working together.
FreeCAD suffers from the lack of proper workflow immensely, and will hamper its adoption unless the maintainers take a far more pragmatic approach to their development. They need to take this more serious, as more usage drives more funding, which drives better development. You can’t just go “It’s open source, YOLO, fuck you if you don’t like how we do things”. Because you’re just going to flounder as a long-lived project, but never a successful one.
I complain about FreeCAD because I want it to get better. I go back to it every year at least once, just to see if they’ve opened their eyes or not. I have used everything from Siemens Solid Edge, to Inventor, to Solidworks, Fusion360, OnShape, Blender, Rhino, hell – EVEN SOLVESPACE is easier to use than FreeCAD and it’s only a solver…not even a true cad environment for anything serious (fillets, etc)
Hell, Plasticity came along just last year and it’s only $100 with no “Rental Models”, and it’s probably already got more users than FreeCAD at this point. It certainly has more people doing tutorials for it, and more people picking it up. Even though it’s not F/OSS - it’s cross platform, cheap, and non-predatory. Obviously I’d prefer F/OSS software, but I’m not going to chop off my right arm to support it or work with so much hindrance that it causes me to work at 20% effectiveness vs other CAD software. Free only goes so far when your time and attention is worth as much as it is.
individual toolsets (2D Animation, Video Editing, VFX, Sculpting, Poly Modeling, Bone Rigging, Scripting – ALL with entire workflows associated with them) – has managed to be a wildly usable solution despite many of its individual subsystems working together.
Yup, I believe this boils down to good project management, someone has to steer those individual components so they work together better, in a cohesive manner, to make the result more than the sum its the parts. This is especially difficult in an opensource context where different contributors have different interests, and I think Blender, having managed that much, is an example to follow.
And I agree with everything you wrote, I don’t expect FreeCAD to get there in a reasonable timeframe unless it gets serious funding and expertise brought in.
Plasticity is a good project to follow, I don’t think they are comparable nor intended for the same audience, but there are product design aspects to learn from it, definitely :)
seem like trying to write Latin.
This is quite funny for someone who has learned a (tiny) bit of latin, because this is 100% true, in like a positive and negative way.
FreeCAD is “unforgiving”, in that pretty much every dimension/curve/shape must be defined exactly as you want, in exchange, this makes the software very good if you know what you want to create, and how.
I’ve only used a tiny bit of Fusion at a school once, but it was a lot more “freeform” than FreeCAD, this made it easier to use, but as someone who knows what they want to create pretty exactly, I prefer FreeCAD
This reflects languages. Latin is very organized, a single verb ending changes it from like “he who did” to like “he who has done” and you’re supposed to know that. It’s heavily theorized (and is 100% paritially true) that Latin is specifically designed as an efficient language to move troops. So, harder to learn but more accuracy.
English on the other hand trades accuracy for a more natural way of relatively easy to understand speak (with a good bit of overlap where there is confusion)
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Forgive me for not using Linux, but I am not having any luck finding a download for Windows? I’ve seen the GitHub pages and they seem to send me in a semi-recursive wild-goose chase that I can’t make sense of.
Can some gentle soul point me to a Windows version? Maybe a direct download link to the ZIP or EXE? I am not very familiar with this, so any help is appreciated!
Downloads are here: https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases
You have to expand the “Assets” button under the text and download one of the two “Win” versions.
Here’s a direct link: https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases/download/Tip/FreeCAD-Link-Tip-Win-x86_64-py3.11-20231102.7z
Ah, thank you!! I was not at all looking for “7z” but I admit it does say “Win” right there in the name :-)
Ain’t it this? Random Lemmy stranger, but this seems to be what you want. It might require you to have Python 3.8, but then again, I know nothing of the program and only reply becase no one did yet. https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases/download/Tip/FreeCAD-Link-Tip-Win-x86_64-py3.8-20231102.7z
FreeCAD is an okay piece of software, I’ve been able to use it but it has a learning curve and in some aspects it is limited. Sounds like this branch removes some of those limitations which is neat.
I’ve also used AutoCAD which is very functional but can cost thousands of dollars a year…
I’m excited to try this, ive been looking for fusion alternatives, i cant stand the cloud based bs. Thanks for the suggestion! We all need to move away from cloud based and subscription based software.
I was literally just starting to learn FreeCAD and was commenting to a friend about how inflexible the design process was, I’m absolutely going to give this a go.
If you are used to using F360 or SolidWorks, this is the version of FreeCAD you should be using. It doesn’t have the TNP problems that the main branch has. Of course, just like commercial CAD, it’s possible to break models by deleting references, and you’ll have to fix them. Experienced users of CAD know this is always possible.
I’ve been using RealThunder’s branch of FreeCAD for a few years and I’m able to do whatever I want, pretty much just like I do in SolidWorks in my day job. Most of my time is spent in the PartDesign workbench, which is really what most people designing for 3D printing should be using.
Remember that you’re using software built and maintained by volunteers. If you want constant improvement, you’re better off paying people whose sole job it is to work on the software. It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth paying for.
Thanks I will have to check it out. I wish it had a flatpak or deb though. I hate appimages.
How does FreeCAD stack against Blender?
How does graph paper stack against a canvas? One is for engineering, the other is for art.
Also, FreeCAD is at least a decade behind Blender in the “No it’s actually really good now and is actually being widely adopted in industry” department.
I don’t think they are really comparable.
Personally I see blender more as an animation or organic modeling tool whereas CAD software like fusion is better when you need exact dimensions for your parts
This is nothing you have to see personally like this but it’s pretty much the definition. Blender is not CAD. End of story.
So is there an open source direct modeler? I’ve been working in Designspark, but while it is not currently as onerous as F360 or OnShape (god forbid I stumble into something that other people decide might be worth a few bucks), it’s still a (free for now) subscription and has had feature erosion, specifically importing darn near anything pre-existing. I’m not making anything complex enough that it suffers from the Direct Modeling workflow, and I find that workflow much more intuitive. Shoot, I’d even settle for a fork of Solvespace with chamfers and fillets, LOL.
I haven’t used Blender for this purpose (or FreeCAD at all, for that matter…just OpenSCAD for doing models for 3D printing). But it looks like Blender has some sort of add-on support for parametric modeling that’s being worked on.
A constraint-based sketcher addon created by hlorus for Blender that allows you to create precise 2d shapes by defining CAD geometric constraints like tangents, distances, angles, equal and more. These Sketches are then converted into beziers or mesh which still stay editable through a fully non-destructive workflow i.e, Geometry nodes and modifiers.
It’s not, historically, the main purpose of the software, but maybe Blender will ultimately wind up moving into the CAD world too to some degree.
Im not going to try and convince people who have already made their mind up, but I ditched Fusion for Blender ages ago and haven’t looked back. Its completely usable for CAD and precision design for 3D printing or what have you. Its not built for it, but its capable if you learn how.
The lack of pure CAD focus is a drawback, but it is largely made up for in blenders absolutely amazing general purpose tool set. Its not just mesh manipulation, with geometry nodes you can create complex intricate shapes that are also precise to your requirements. There are countless workflows and plugins that allow you to make blender adapt your needs. You can remix existing STLs and bring in reference photos/models/etc. Simply put IMO there is no need to use any other program for almost any aspect of 3D design, and so it has become my go to.
I don’t recommend it for beginners, but it really is an incredibly powerful tool if you put the work in. Is it better that FreeCAD or Fusion? I am not qualified to say, but I’m pretty confident there are few features either package has that blender does not.
Blender is a swiss army knife, not really comparable, but i’d recommend it over most CAD software if your main focus is 3d printing as most slicer convert to mesh data anyway.
My experience in trying Blender for 3d printed part design was short lived because it’s not really built for doing accurate and precise modeling, where FreeCAD is.
Blender is well received in the industry and can compete with the best. It also has a few nice features that aren’t standard and make it stand out among the competition.
FreeCAD is none of that.
They also are in completely different industries.
Freecad is for manufacturing. Blender is for art.
Thanks! I know I’ve tried freecad in the past and found it really tough to wrap my head around, but I’ll give it a try because as I said a few days ago, at any moment the tinkercad I use regularly could go away.
Curious to know which version of freecad did you try ? Few days ago I installed the latest edge version from snap (0.22 in progress) and didn’t notice this issue. I know about this issue & realthunder, also watched some of his interviews and found that the guy is a master of his field.
Anyways, now I’m on beta channel of freecad-realthunder.
Thank you for posting this. My introduction to CAD was trying out FreeCAD when I reached the limits of Adobe Illustrator’s accuracy. The interface was so obtuse and difficult to work with I just gave up and assumed all CAD programs were like that. I’ll give Link Branch a shot!
I was using link branch for awhile. It’s OK, FreeCAD is OK. It does suck at a lot though. Once solidworks released their maker plan, I jumped on it. It’s such a superior product.
Isn’t it wild that all the FORKS of FreeCAD somehow manage to have better versions? FreeCAD is OVER 20 YEARS OLD.
How is it still such a piece of shit software? Because the maintainers are garbage. It has nothing to do with the topology problem, it has to do with workflow, and FreeCAD lacks it almost completely.
Edit: Ohhh, this is realthunder’s fork! Glad to see he’s continuing on it, but yeah - I think by now most FreeCAD users had known/switched over to his version anyhow.
