For whatever reason I just could not for the life of me get FreeCAD to work at all.
No matter what I wanted to do, it felt like it would always behave in a way I didn’t expect, do nothing at all, not work like it did in tutorials, or flat out make a change that then became impossible to undo, or take me to a menu that I somehow just couldn’t get out of.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I had to literally give up on FreeCAD after spending hours trying and failing to make even the simplest shapes, like a cube with an indent in the middle.
It’s good FreeCAD exists, but it needs a LOT of polish, especially for people who don’t already have experience with tools like Fusion, and only have more rudimentary CAD experience with tools like the ones built into slicers, Tinkercad, or Onshape.
I couldn’t get into fusion at all but had a bunch of (dated) solidworks experience, it worked well for me following a similar workflow I’d follow. Found it worked best to not use references to existing geometry and doing things like fillets last, I like to hand sketch first anyhow so that translates well in my experience.
Part design and sketch workbench are the way to go imo, it’s gotten a lot friendlier since 1.0, I recall a lot of people liked ondsel in terms of ux, think a lot of the stuff they were doing actually ended up in 1.0, the topo naming problem is less of an issue, I’ll still work around it (hence avoiding geometry references) though.
How recently? Last time I tried was early December of 2024 (version 1.0), though I suppose a lot of the tutorials I was watching were probably made on at least 1 version prior based on their release dates.
For whatever reason I just could not for the life of me get FreeCAD to work at all.
No matter what I wanted to do, it felt like it would always behave in a way I didn’t expect, do nothing at all, not work like it did in tutorials, or flat out make a change that then became impossible to undo, or take me to a menu that I somehow just couldn’t get out of.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I had to literally give up on FreeCAD after spending hours trying and failing to make even the simplest shapes, like a cube with an indent in the middle.
It’s good FreeCAD exists, but it needs a LOT of polish, especially for people who don’t already have experience with tools like Fusion, and only have more rudimentary CAD experience with tools like the ones built into slicers, Tinkercad, or Onshape.
I couldn’t get into fusion at all but had a bunch of (dated) solidworks experience, it worked well for me following a similar workflow I’d follow. Found it worked best to not use references to existing geometry and doing things like fillets last, I like to hand sketch first anyhow so that translates well in my experience.
Part design and sketch workbench are the way to go imo, it’s gotten a lot friendlier since 1.0, I recall a lot of people liked ondsel in terms of ux, think a lot of the stuff they were doing actually ended up in 1.0, the topo naming problem is less of an issue, I’ll still work around it (hence avoiding geometry references) though.
Have you tried it recently? I had good success with their tutorials. Though I sure wasn’t using advanced features. And plugins were hit or miss.
I second this. Version 1.0 was only released a year ago. I gave it another try and was pleasantly surprised!
How recently? Last time I tried was early December of 2024 (version 1.0), though I suppose a lot of the tutorials I was watching were probably made on at least 1 version prior based on their release dates.
Maybe it’s just a skill issue on my part 💀
I used the tutorials on the wiki in the past year.