I thought I would knock some dust off my drafting skills after a small chat with @captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works
Seeing this image on the tutorial made me realize, FreeCAD seems to be a Technical Geometry Super-Suite. It makes sense that CAD would grow to include all of these things. But I thought sharing the initial perspective of some one who hasn’t looked at this stuff in about 18 years might be interesting.
Granted I’m not actually familiar with most of this stuff, and none of it from the POV of FreeCAD. If this can deliver 10% of what I’m looking at, I’m in for a treat.
Seems like a good opportunity to ask if anyone can recommend learning materials for FreeCAD? Used Solidworks and AutoCAD in school but fell back on tinkercad for a recent project just cause I didn’t have time to invest in learning.
From my perspective the biggest thing wrong with FreeCAD is that it’s a single threaded app in a multicore world. If you load large stuff, the app freezes and one core is working really hard for a while.
Isn’t like every CAD program single core? People got scammed hard with Xeon in the past. CAD PC salesmen had/have absolutely no idea what they were talking about
Biggest speedup has been the GPU integration. The single core stuff doesn’t seem to matter much anymore.
Mastercam does pretty well once you force it to use hardware accelleration
Solidworks is the same way.
No, it’s the topological naming problem. End of.
That doesn’t have me wait for tens of minutes while one core slogs it’s guts out and the other fifteen sit there idle.
Great piece of software, but still nowhere near the beauty of PicoCAD
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Can it export STL/3MF without making all the circles low poly yet?
Last time I tried it freecad was not usable for 3d printing because it doesn’t export properly.
With the naming bug that still exists too I found it basically unusable even for basic parts. It feels like going back 20 years compared to fusion 360.
I noticed a similar problem importing step files… I no longer had circles, I had nonagons… I would love to delete my windows vm that only exists for fusion 360.
If you are comfortable with all your models being available for download and some wonky Terms of Use that may let random internet people profit off your designs but not you, then OnShape in a full-screen browser feels about as good as F360 does. I guess you could also pay for it, but despite finding it pretty nice, I am iffy about paying Solid Edge prices for something browser based. I understand SolidWorks has slapped together a browser version as well, but nobody likes it.
Linux wise, there’s just not much outside FreeCAD and SolveSpace. BricsCAD is an okay evolution of AutoCAD, and VariCAD is a less good one.
I may have done a longer writeup than anybody needed the other day.
