I am a former employe of Dassault Systèmes and used Catia V5 since about 20 years (plus UG, Inventor, Blender, Fusion, etc). So glad to see such an amazing open source software as FreeCad. Amazing work done by the community. However, it makes me sick to hear here and there from users people talking about "Good practice" when in fact it is work around and silly tedious contortions for a massive issue other CAD softwares deal prefectly with since eons. If a parametric software CAN'T deal with topological naming correctly... well... it is NOT a parametric CAD. Glad to hear that a non official branch solved most of the issues, but knowing the problems with files compatibility from one version to the other in freecad, let's hope this set of fixes will be integrated in the official version soon and make finally Freecad dominates. I teach FreeCad and seriously, other than that issue, it is amazing!
NO, NO, NO!! Working with named topological is in fact the dirty work around , no matter if it was established 20 years ago. And it`s the main cause why we cant exchange parametric models to this day!
The way FreeCAD currently forces you to work really is best practice - when whole parts of your model depend on a previous part no CAD program can actually handle a change to that part exactly the way you want every single time - where forcing you to use some functions and set everything on working planes offset from the origin is entirely dependable, as long as you get those formulas right the part will only shift in the way you want with changes to the parameters in older parts. That said its is just so convenient to bolt the next bits onto the existing model and in most cases works well enough, even with FreeCADs wonkyness, that who needs best practice most of the time (Plus the whole formula for repositioning of the working planes starts making just using OpenSCAD seem like a winner).
Incompatibilities with other versions are caused by new features witch are not presented in older versions. Taking a model made with FreeCAD 0.18 to 0.2 works as i know.
It is not non-official branch because he is involving the debugging of official FreeCAD especially on topo issue. And the branch is updated in compliance with official release from time to time.
Considering RealThunder's patches are going to be implemented in the main branch eventually, it stands to reason that FreeCAD will perform somewhat like RealThunder's current branch at some point in the future. I say go for it with the RealThunder branch videos for now. Irrespective of obsolescence, things move so quickly these days anyway, we might as well make the most of the FOSS software we have now, while we can!
@@schrodingerscat1863 FreeCAD needs a hero. Musescore and Audacity were "saved" by Tantacrul (Martin Keary) in recent years. We need more people like him to help drive innovation within the FOSS Engineering software branches. Who could help save FreeCAD, do you think?
Finding this comment is absolutely hilarious because this hasnt happened and its been 2 years, and Ive seen like 2 other niche unstable branches people swear are going to be integrated into mainline any second now. Freecad really does have a big problem.
@@BeefIngot Seems my comment was deleted since I referenced a video. Developers are actively working on it and it will be released in the next few months alongside v1. Ondsel and the nightly builds confirm this.
From my perspective, FreeCad will NEVER become the CAD standard, Makers graph of the learning curve is completely wrong, the overhang on the graph should be right at the beginning, I've worked, as an amateur, with Solidworks, Alibre, TurboCad, BobCad and others over the past 30+ years and, while I recognize the capabilities of Freecad _if_ you can get past the initial stages, most just give up in frustration after the first week. Freecad has to get to be more user friendly
@@L98fiero Coming from Fusion360, once I got on a roll, I got mildly dangerous in a short amount of time due entirely to Maker Tales videos. I tried the rest, and found the best here. It is my lifeline to getting anything done in FreeCAD. Just before getting into FreeCAD, I tried SelfCAD and it was an immediate disaster. If you think FreeCAD is intimidating, SelfCAD was all over the place with community-lead support. I bailed fast when I started having tremors based on its overcomplication. The SelfCAD people were like, "Don't run away, tells us your problems." The problems were too great for me to think anything I could say about their fundamental flaws would bear results.
I'm also one of the developers. Thanks for tackling this in a respectful and educational way instead of just throwing shade. Your video is a really good explanation of the topological naming 'problem'. -- I disagree with you on that particular point. It isn't a 'silly bug' or something easily overcome. (If it was that easy, it would have been resolved long ago). It's called a 'problem' because the issue is intrinsic to parametric modeling. It can never be 'solved', only mitigated and avoided. In fact, if you know what you're doing, you can trigger a parametric model to break in _any_ parametric modeling software. Admittedly, most software handles/avoids it better than FreeCAD does currently but I don't think it's possible to ever say it's 'solved'. Realthunder's linkstage is a huge improvement and I can't wait to see his fixes become part of FreeCAD. I don't have good advice for you about how to make your videos. I would suggest that you should always stress good design principles which avoid breaking models. That means all the techniques you mentioned. Thanks for doing this and keeping the discussion professional.
I see how this problem is intrinsic to parametric modeling but I also belive that measures can be taken to mitigate this. Maybe it can't be fixed 100 % but 90 % would do it. even 50 % would be great.
@@TheYear2525 Absolutely! We can (and should) continue to improve the reliability of the software. Whenever possible we should make it resistant to breaking models. But robust software isn't a panacea for bad design practices. CAD is hard and designing models that are flexible and resilient requires practice and discipline. I don't think anyone in the FreeCAD community thinks that topo-naming isn't an issue. It has been acknowledged and discussed for a long time. Our critics have sometimes suggested that we should accept a weak (50%?) solution _now_ rather than a better (90%) solution _later_. As users, that's understandable but as developers we have to consider the long-term health and maintainability of the code base. Fortunately we have a very talented developer in @Realthunder and a very strong solution is on the horizon.
I am not a coder so I cannot judge this at all - but the problem of TNP is something I leaned just recently in freecad while I just and teach Fusion360 I never came across it. Of course features can get references lost and then you refresh it. That was never a big issue nor breaking the model. So I hope that at one point freecad can get closer and improve also how people can work safely.
I think one of the things that throws off most beginners with using FreeCAD is they equate "parametric modeling" to being able to go in and change any parameter and have it just work. We expect the ability to go into the sketches or the parameter list and modify them without breaking the models. I had a client once wanting to change his models based off the measurements entered into a linked TechDraw document. So, yea, I know the general public is sometimes asking for too much because they can have unrealistic expectations too.
I use FC once in a while to design very simple parts for 3D printing. I don't have much CAD experience, but made my living before retirement as a software engineer. Clearly this problem is a serious design flaw, whether or not "bug" is the right term for it. I have read quite a few forum threads etc. on this, and have often encountered comments to the effect that, well, you shouldn't use CAD software that way anyway. Also, there are plenty of remarks to the effect that this is a hard problem to solve. It may be a difficult problem to solve, but a lot of comments excusing FC miss an important point. Take the "simple" example in this video that demonstrates the problem (three stacked rectangular bits). If, to a human user, the identity of the faces,, or features, is clearly retained through the edit, and the intended result is conceptually clear to a human, then there is a software solution to the problem. If the software does not produce expected results which can be clearly defined by the human user, the software is WRONG. I acknowledge that (software implementation aside) there may be cases in which an alteration or transformation creates ambiguity about the identity of the resulting geometry, and what would constitute "correct" results. But that is clearly not so for many simple instances where the topological naming problem creates unexpected, and clearly wrong results. So really, there is no good reason to accept the current behaviour and work around it, at least not for long.
@@rogersmith5183 The point is not about whether complaints about FC are valid or invalid, or whether the software is free or costs money. The point is that the topological naming problem is a design error, not a user-practice error.
@@djpenton779 Actually, my point is that highly productive work can be done with FreeCad even with the "bugs"... and for free. I have been involved in software design and programming of some sort since about 1981. There are "bugs" in every piece of software. Ask Willie Gates.
@@djpenton779 Anyone who uses Modeling CAD software knows that the "topological naming problem" is an issue with a number of CAD packages - if not all at one point during development. I think the video should have been just about the topic, rather than dissing a single product. "FreeCAD is Broken..!" Really? The thumbnail alone begs the potential user to search for an alternative. You are correct - stick to the point, rather than single out a product.
Please teach us how to use FreeCAD in it's current state, even with the workarounds. Why? Because even with the inconveniences, it still makes CAD design accessible to those of us who can't afford the Fusion tools at their ridiculously high prices. When and if FreeCAD fixes their bugs, you can still do new videos. It's better to have useful info on a cumbersome product, than to be able to use no product at all.
Siemens Solid Edge with it's Community Edition (this means everyone, even people that is not a student or does not have a business can use this edition) by far is a better option, you can even get certificated for free. I hate both Fusion 360 and FreeCad so seeing a complete software like Solid Edge for free was a take of fresh air for me. Only limitations: 2D draws are watermarked You can't open your design on professional edition of SolidEdge Topology Optimization can only react to Force but no press or torque
A Video about the Datum Plan Workflow sounds really useful. I don’t think that video would become outdated, when the topological naming problem is solved. Sounds more like a useful concept that could be handy in tricky situations.
I do CAD works occasionally and I'm getting to know FreeCad lately. I like it! And yes, I also fall into that "bug" once. When it happened I didn't realise what sort of sorcery happened in front of my eyes and just removed shapes and stacked them up again. Not a big deal. Wish not to pile up things in some bigger project though...
I watched this video a few days after taking your freecad turorial. About 2 months in working with FreeCAD, I started experiencing this issue while editing bodies and I kept this information in mind. It really helped me not lose my mind knowing this has nothing to do with my skills but a limitation of the tool itself
I was on the design team for the B-1B armament and weapons loader trainer, designer of the ejection seat inert training modules. some how a real ejection seat munitions module got int the training room and on to an ejection seat. No one was in the seat and they were showing what handle to pull and it went off sending the ejection seat thru the roof of the hanger. There was about 10-15 different modules. I accomplished the project that was adopted air force wide. I started out as a apprentice manual machinist at a local textile factory and went to work at Kelly AFB and was a journeyman machinist until I got into drafting and became a draftsman. I then went to Randolph AFB as a engineering tech and worked on the B1-B project till it finished and retired at 56 yrs old. We were on computer vision software and did 3D wire frame design. I'm starting my small machine shop up and needed a cad program for an 82 going on 83 yr old man. I'm having a learning curve on FreeCAD as my mind is still thinking computer vision. But come hades or high water I'm gonna win..
Is FreeCAD 0.20 Broken? Find out here: ua-cam.com/video/U6W0ipxzKBE/v-deo.html A huge thank you for all your comments and I love to read through them all! (So keep commenting I love to know your thoughts on this) For the time being, I have gone with the majority decision of starting a course with Real Thunders Branch: ua-cam.com/video/p_ZEry2wTfg/v-deo.html Once freeCAD updates I'll also be making a new course then. And don't worry you hardcore veterans and engineers my plan is to teach the basics first and then I'll show the origin and datum plain referencing workflow.
Well it is developed by freelancers and for that they did a fantastic job - but that does not make the lacking tools easier - just learned today that there is no find intersection point in sketcher …
@@paulreader1777, Creo's free/eval version was very limited in the formats that it could export. You couldn't even export to the paid version of Creo, which to me was an absurd.
This *exact* bug has literally driven me to tears of frustration. Like, I was trying to design a fan duct for a 3d printer. My boss wanted me to change a "few little things". *Every single time* I changed anything, it would run into this exact issue. It got to the point where it just was less of a hassle for me to just delete the sketches I made until I get to the semi starting point, then re-make the sketches *with* those changes baked in. Honestly, this kind of thing is a major reason why I still have zero patience for FreeCAD any time any minor thing goes wrong.
@@andyspoo2 FreeCAD is at the rather frustrating intersection between "quite capable of a lot of things," "free" and "having some glaring issues." For a free piece of software, it's just nice enough to justify using, but also frustrating enough that you don't want to spend too much time wrestling with it.
@@davidwarford3087 Blender never had the problem of arbitrarily renaming the canonical names of objects. It boggles my mind any system would ever do that, honestly. How is that not obviously the wrong way to do it?
Several years ago when looking at cad programs, I took one look at the fusion 360 license terms, foresaw pretty much what happened, and went elsewhere. Losing full access to my own design drawings because of a software and license update was not a risk I was willing to take.
@@EddoWagt A situation I avoided by not using fusion 360. The risk exists any time your files are not on your hardware, or depends on software that could be "upgraded" without your control.
@@EddoWagt You do actually have full access. The "issue" is that you can only edit 10 files at a time... Which basically means you can only have 10 tabs open. In order to edit them you need to click a lock button in order to make them uneditable to free up your slots. That said, you technically can have more than 10 files open simultaneously, you just can't edit more than 10 at once... Which outside of some insane setups isn't much of a limit. Annoying, yes, limiting? No. And if instead @hanelp1 is talking about fusion 360 saving everything to the cloud, it isn't hard to save the files to your computer and to load them that way. (Export instead of save.)
I've been thinking about switching from Fusion to FC but then I came across this video. It's now two years old- has this issue been fixed yet?? This would definitely be a dealbreaker for me.
There was a fork of freecad with this fixed and as far as i know they still trying to incorporate fix for main branch, if you don't have VERY good reason to switch, don't switch, freecad is a pain overall. I would even say that paid fusion is chaper than freecad when you take into consideration that your work time is worth more than 0$/h
Same there for Siemens NX: As a power user, I can say that for robust models you should AVOID referencing on faces or edges. The robustness hierarchy is : 1. coordinate systems 2. planes 3. faces 4. edges
Long time Creo Parametric user here, while what you say is fundamentally right, CAD software is evolving in the direction of being as robust while doing some of the under the hood work for the user. For a simple three level pyramid as in the video, one can of course build a datum planes and coordinate systems structure before "filling" it with parts, but since when I started dabbling with parametric solid CAD in the early 2000s there was really no need for using such a complex structure for such a simple part.
Sometimes can be a real PITA to create a datum plane over a face created by arbitrary cuts with unknown angle. At the end I was forced to make my own trigonometric calcs before start drawing the next shape/feature. This is not using a CAD system, but a perverse form of self-torture...
It's still completely broken. They're working on TNP for a long time. There is a branch that actually already fixes it and is currently incorporated into the main branch. What it doesn't solve: inconsistencies, permanent crashes, stupid behaviour, things breaking randomly and overall agony when trying to use it. I've spent (better wasted) the last two years "learning" it. It's complete and utter dog shit, which I am very very very sad about. It could've been a good tool. But there is a reason why it is still in beta after OVER TWENTY YEARS in development. To make sure I'm not being misunderstood: I've put far over 200h into FreeCAD. I can't even estimate how much. I've been using it for over 2 years now. It's dog shit and I'm slowly losing patience with it. If you want to be productive: pay for some commercial tool and save yourself from wasting hours and hours of your lifetime. It's not worth it.
Anyone watching this in 2023+ ... 0.20.2 was released on schedule and works well. We are currently using 0.21 (Beta) for a large Architectural model and it's been great. 😍 FreeCAD certainly has quirks and steep learning curve but it's worth the effort to learn and us it. Beats paying obscene amounts to RENT closed source software.
And a year later, 0.2 is out, and no joy. So sad. Meanwhile, more and more people are moving to the RealThunder branch. Not a good sign for the official open source version. Why isn’t this priority #1? Amazing.
I've tried a number of CAD programs. There's a vast disconnect between the way their programmers expect a drawing and an object to be created and how an experienced design engineer does so. They're far too pedestrian and inhibit creativity.
I have to agrre with the community part. Since i came from solidworks, i was just giving an idea for frecad development, i ended up banned from freecad forum. I still love freecad but is sad that this happens. If you want to develop a open source software, you have to know what the industry uses and what tools it needs. Most features asked and solved for blender come from Maya or 3ds users tham came to Blender. This is really important. SO in conclusion, if we want a really robust cad software, all critics and sugestions diserves attention (like this vide) So the development can grows faster
I agree 100%. Are you familiar with GIMP? How many years did they refuse to adhere to ANY standards, intuition or oven common sense? They changed some things for the better but the UI is still light-years away from anything you want to use for more then basic tasks. The sad thing is, under the hood GIMP is really gold. Only the UI sucks soooo bad, its not even real.
I use different CAD software depending on the model I need to make and the purpose of it. I really like the FreeCAD spreadsheet function, and I was comfortable using datum plane referencing from the beginning, but it was tedious before they added the ability to set certain plane offsets with spreadsheet functions. At this point, I can usually create whatever I want unless it contains fillets. The name topology absolutely ruins these to the point where the fillet needs to be the last operation in your part, after which you can never edit anything again. Since Fusion360 added in more restrictions for the free version, I've moved away to Solid Edge, which is basically magic for editing step files. I'm still not super used to the workflow of editing so many things in 3D instead of sketches, but I find that CAD skills are transferable regardless of the software you choose.
Looking back, 0.2 did not fix it. For me as a beginner it means I never had any benefit from parametric designs as an anyway have to fix the models after a change along the tree. So most of the time it is better not to reference external geometry as it will only create a cascade of Desaster. I would buy fusion, but I do not want an Abo or a free version that may be gone next week. So FreeCad is my program but yes it slows down my idea flow because I spend most of the time to search the way to calculate absolute positions
On another point, the best way for a free cad program to spur adoption is to open itself to customization in UI so that it can be refamiliarized for people transitioning from other CAD softwares. I really can't stress how underestimatedly important that is. Shortcuts, button placement, mouse controls, etc is really what makes or breaks it for being able to fluidly jump from different programs.
with all due respect, that's not a bug nor a problem. if you learn creo, solidworks, fusion 360, you have your own methods of doing things, freecad has it's own. we used creo in uni, and i honestly, find FreeCAD better.
I think FreeCad is fundamentally good. It was never broken but it does/did take an effort to learn to drive properly. The more I learn about it, the more power I find it has. I accept that other 3D modelling programmes are available. As a retired engineer I find Freecad's clean presentation a bonus.
It is broken, the way they link sketches to named faces that can move around causes all kinds of problems needing work arounds all over the place. The RealThunder fork fixes this issue though and gives a much better user experience.
I don’t like the freecad dev community. Once I said (based on my younger self) that even the logo was a bit old looking. The first time I tried to use 3D cad software I fell in love with fusion 360 just based on its appearance. I asked them if the logo could be changed to get more users and they treated me like a dumb boy, they were very disrespectful and said that “you don’t use cad software for its looking but for its functionality and if you think better looking is important you are not the expected public for this software”. Ok, that might be true with experienced modelers, but for newcomers that’s something really important, I guess. When you see an old logo it makes you feel like it’s old software (it’s crap). Even if I was wrong they could have said something like “Ok, that’s something we might consider” that’s it. They made me feel bad that day 😂
It is not good practice to use surfaces as reference planes, you should use datum planes for this purpose as it can cause issues with complex designs even though it works in NX /SW / Caria. You should teach the use of origin and planes as references as this is often required in large company environments
I want to use FreeCAD when I need to use a solid modelling type program vs. the surface modelling program I usually use. Thanks for letting me know about this issue. I did try to learn FreeCAD but haven't had much time to really get in to it. I ran across an issue with just trying to scale a part. It wouldn't let me do it. It wanted me to make a copy of the part I had created then would let me scale the copy. I wanted to scale the original as I realized I used the wrong units when I started the model. For now, I continue to do most of my work in Rhinoceros 3D.
I haven been using some 3D modeling software long before I got into 3D printing and encountered Freecad. And I thought "What the hell is wrong with this program? Why does editing the shapes you made your object of end in breaking it all at least 50 % of the time?". To edit things I then used to delete the last step(s) and do it all over. Then I discovered re-referencing. Still it's unbelivable that this hasn't been fixed years ago. This is not how things are suposed to work. Your comparison with a cliff actually totally expresses how it feels. Although technically your cliff function, that isn't a real function, would take you back in time xD .
This bug is exactly why I said "Fuck this! I'm already using Blender, can't I just CAD model in there?", and that's how I found your channel and Blender Precision series!
Well not a lot of what freecad can do Blender can remotely do. No trimming clean surface no fillets on trimmed edges no parametric modeling. Blender and freecad are two very different things
@@cekuhnen How to do everything you just mentioned in Blender: -Trimming: use boolean or knife modifier (Depends on desired accuracy and complexity) -Fillet: use bevels and increase the face count. -Parametric modelling: There's literaly a modifiers tab and you can edit everything from the geometry in edit mode from a panel without needing to use any gizmos, just parameters. Don't say blender can't do it, just put a bit more effort into learning and you'll see the tools are there. Besides, if you lack anything, Blender being free there's always a plugin out there that will add it... and considering how blender is with its modifier workflow you can basically ignore that and work entirely with the tools it gives you.
The beauty of FreeCad is there's more than one way to accomplish the same thing. Just make three separate sketches and merge them when you're done. No bugs, easy af.
Whilst the TNP is a serious issue for FreeCAD I don't see how it can ever be totally solved in any parametric editor of this type. If you daisy chain off faces, what happens if you go back in to an earlier stage and make a change that removes a face something else is built on? So whilst I agree FreeCAD doesn't handle it that well and designs can fall apart after changes that shouldn't cause that, even if fixed as far as possible, some structural care is needed.
Yes, I came to the same conclusion. Broken. I found there was little consistency between the UI for different menus. Its as if 20 different menus were written by 21 different coders - each with their own interpretation of how the UI should work. It looks great from the outside until you start trying to do something real with it. Openscad (Parametric CAD) is far more useful productive and consistent. You code up what you want the package to do. I also using Blender 3.1 and settled on that
I think I ran into this after about 30 minutes in FreeCAD, it made me really not want to bother learning more of the software. If Fusion360 wasn't actively trying to drive away all of the free hobbyists I would probably have stopped completely.
Minor correction, it's FreeCAD 0.20 (o point twenty) the version number is not a decimal but a MAYOR_VERSION.MINOR_VERSION naming scheme so trailing zeros should not be omitted. FreeCAD 0.2 came out a loooong time ago.
Major, not mayor. What is with FreeCad folks saying "mayor"? You're not the only one. And it really should be Major.Minor.Patch to follow semver standards, in which case the version would be 0.20.0. They do this with their github releases, just very inconsistently. It's weird.
In my case my native language is Spanish where there is a very similar word that is actually spelled mayor, could have been my own mistake or Spanish autocorrect, given how it's written here it's most likely my mistake. Can't speak for anybody else. Regarding inconsistent versioning, yes I have complained about this myself to the maintainers and worked towards making it more consistent. Either way my point was that trailing 0 should not be omitted.
This is a major roadblock to Assemblies, as well. The most useful application of Assembly (as in SolidWorks), is to rough out ideas for each part, assemble them, then iteratively refine and correct them as needed. But as soon as you edit a part in FreeCAD, all the face names are scrambled, and the assembly relations are horribly broken. It is EXPECTED that assemblies will reveal changes that need to be made. That's kind of the whole point of CAD-to be able to discover and correct design problems in software, where it's easier. Without a robust and reliable Assembly platform, it will not progress beyond an interesting hobby tool.
Your concerns are spot on but Freecad already a fundamental problem with its terminology, which makes it far less intuitive than other software. Coming from an FEA background I expected it to be easy to pick up but the last three weeks of me trying to adapt to it have been incredibly frustrating. It is a pig. Perfectly capable but because it has grown with contributors each having different ideas, it has become an overly complex monster that has a steep learning curve regardless of the bugs, once the user starts to push beyond simple sketches and models. I'm sure that many power users love it because of its flaws and nuances but I doubt most users will ever get to that stage.
I'm a Solidworks user and I never use a face as a reference plane. I also try my hardest to never create new planes. I usually work off a Skeleton model that only contains sketches and they are mostly referenced to the top, front or side planes. Things stay much more stable this way especially when you have many parts referencing the skeleton model
In FreeCAD the sketches suffer the same naming problem as the faces of the model. If you edit a sketch and just add one line to it (and not touch any of the existing lines) then all the other lines in that sketch might get renamed. So the skeleton model made out of sketches can crumble pretty easily in FreeCAD.
@@IndrekL oh that's a shame. I can see how that could really make it difficult to use. It's a shame because I would love a free alternative to Solidworks. 1 licence costs more than my car
I have a completely different suggestion: double down on Blender. Most people using Blender love the open source nature and CANNOT use Fusion360 (for whatever reason). Also Blender is more powerful then Fusion in many areas. I would suggest you pick some of the best beginner/advanced Fusion360 tutorials where they create simple parts. Then you use Blender to imitate the tutorial. I actually did that with a Fusion tutorial. At first I was annoyed but I learned so much: 1. sometimes very similar solutions exist in Blender (which you wouldn't have found otherwise) 2. sometimes you do it completely different (the Blender way) 3. often you do a combination of 1. and 2. 4. modifierers, modifierers, modifierers: you often build entire objects just using modifiers. Therefore fully parameterized! Maybe in 12-18 months FreeCAD has gotten it ironed out. At the moment its not worth learning stuff that might change in a few months. I also sunk almost a week in FreeCAD. I love it but hate it more ;) It's worth having your own niche...something like: show people how Blender can be comparable to Fusion360 in many cases.
Great idea. Jonathan has enough experience in Blender to make a playlist of videos where he challenges himself to re-work popular Fusion360 tutorials (links in the description) in Blender. If you pick the right tutorials, Blender can even shine in comparison.
True. If you have enough Blender and CAD Transforms experience, you can do some 3D CAD modelling quicker then Fusion. Also the Blender community is extremely active (compared to FreeCAD). If somebody shows the way, the devs might be swayed to add more CAD functionality in Blender in the future. I have seen similar things happen in the past for other functionality. Thumbs up from me. It would be an interesting experiment to watch Fusion360 tutorials and then think while you are watching how to do them in Blender. If you have a playlist of a dozen top notch Blender tutorials that do a similar or better job then the videos of the Fusion360-Gurus on UA-cam, people would flock to Blender and your channel as an open-source Fusion alternative. Many people EVERY DAY turn to 3D printing and CAD. Often they pick Fusion. Then they sink thousands of hours into the software, so obviously it will produce excellent results. Nobody does something similar with Blender. Why? Because they haven't been shown the way! It's one thing to make good Blender tutorials. People cannot really judge on that basis if Blender is really on the same level as Fusion. But if you PROOF that you can "copy" top-notch UA-cam Fusion360 tutorials in Blender in the same/similar time with similar/better results, people will pick Blender over Fusion. In the last 12 month many friends asked me for 3D software advice. I always pointed at your tutorials and some stuck with Blender instead of the widely advertised Fusion. I am 100% sure I could have convinced more if I had a dozen side-by-side tutorials of Fusion vs. Blender, where Blender is equal or better.
I have to agree. The models you build with Blender are impressive: ua-cam.com/play/PL6Fiih6ItYsX8gnnek59lIPrtqnCAyg-o.html No reason you cannot make a playlist called: "Easy, Advanced and Expert Fusion360 tutorials NOW possible in Blender. Quicker, Better and Open Source!". Or something shorter and more catchy :P Fusion has so much publicity, you need to challenge it head on. If people see that Blender is as good as Fusion (e.g. for 3D printing), they will come.
UA-cam recently suggested a few Fusion360 tutorials to me and although I am a Blender guy, I watched them and reproduced some in Blender. Didn't notice any time or quality difference modelling the stuff from the tutorials in Blender. Somebody reproducing Fusion-Tutorials in Blender doesn't exist. It would be a great learning experience. In the comments we could critique how you could have done things differently/better. Please do a Fusion-goes-Blender playlist Jonathan! There is real interest in this.
blender can cause issues when trying to 3d print because it works with a different type of 3d modeling (frankly I did not understand the explanation but it can cause downloaded stls to be unprintable) something to do with missing or overlapping faces that causes a problem. some people had fixes, others said they didn't work. can't say I know for sure if it's a significant problem but it seemed like it (plus it was harder to understand blender to me) so I moved to cads
If you think that Datum Plain workflows will still work in future versions, it would be useful to have them. If it's a good practice across any CAD platform, it's a good thing to teach and a good thing to learn. If a quick and convenient shortcut (building off of faces) comes along in a form where the software does a decent job of protecting a user from their own poor CAD practices, that's fine, teach it when it arrives.
It over complicates models because you end up having to have parametric functions to update the position of the datum plane which has to be added manually. No one is going to want to go through that for basic modelling. You normally wouldn't get into that until you start putting assemblies together.
Seems to be a persistent problem in the open-source world. The software is written by the users, but since they understand it from the inside out, they aren't motivated to fix the problems that new users see from the outside. In some cases it seems they relish that people find the software impenetrable. I haven't yet jumped in to freeCAD, because it does seem to suffer from this problem...
As someone who has just started to use freeCAD and has struggled to try to design a hush-box for my projector I wholeheartedly agree. Yes, there are tutorials. But I truly struggle to find a good way to build a wooden box... A friggin box. Not an animated articulated industrial robot arm. A goddamn static nonmoving box. Or just move the camera inside a house without getting polecat syndrome. And most tutorials I find are just timelapse videos. And even when I find someone that talks. They never say why I should use one tool over another. Or why an approach should not be used in some circumstance. Nothing. So I can't implement their knowledge in other situations. And the echochamber thinking is probably part of the problem. Because if you know all the steps needed to do the basics you don't want to relearn them, so you get reluctant to implement changes that makes things more intuitive. I mean. I see the potentials here. I just want to be able to use the tools.
Its good practice to use parameteic reference planes rather than body features so it's not really an issue. This same "issue" occurs in professional and very expensive software too.
I've been using faces as references in Solidworks for well over a decade and never had the slightest problem. Other software can handle this robustly, but you have to pay for it.
Teach FreeCAD as is. Also teach RealThunder's branch. Just make your videos appropriately. Then when the new release finally comes out you'll redo a bunch of the teaching videos but that will keep your channel full of content. Videos become obsolete over time. That's just the way it is. But that also leaves you with plenty of new content to create. Keeping your channel relevant and numbers going up.
At a company that takes cad seriously you wouldn't be allowed to draw straight on a face due to this "bug". Makes the model as stable as a house of cards in a 100km/h storm for future changes.. Just use planes to drive the model and problem goes away...
I was dragged kicking and screaming and forced to briefly use cad (solidworks) at uni. Years later I found myself needing cad for a hobby project (model steam engines). I taught myself freecad and never actually encountered the bug you reference here, partly because I rarely change and object using its history without a fundamental re-design of said object, but mainly because i found only using origin referenced planes kind of necessary to avoid your whole assembly becoming a jumbled mess of incomprehensible parameters. I get that some people might just want a user friendly intuitive piece of software to blitz out a single body for their printer, but multiple such things already exist. I don't see why freecad has to be that, and I certainly don't see it as broken.
Thanks for the explanation. Used to program cad programs as a day job. Nothing easy about it. I would tend to agree with you on the dont put out vids that may be obsolete tutorials in a few months time. My take on this would be make new tutorials using the thunder branch clearly prefacing the video with the fact its not the official branch and link back to this one to explain why. You should try a few complicated workflows in both version and film them with snagit (whatever screen cap soft you use will do). Maybe diff the resultant step files to check how they differ between the official and thunder branch. (I suspect thunder may do this themself). Dont give up on freecad its so powerful and our best chance of preventing complete comercial dominance of fusion and solid worx from being the only options and not having cadcam being only sas. Also by doing all your workflows twice in both apps you make find thunder some bugs they have missed or conversely help freecad to implement the right fixes back into the official. Hard work but thoroughly worth it if you can get freecad official back on track.
We have friends in the Blender community and they have provided advice often over the years. There's a subtle implication in your comment that FreeCAD's issues are about mismanagement or incompetence. That's not fair (or accurate). FreeCAD is a very different project with a very different history. Blender started life as commercial software. It had paid developers from the beginning. Today they have the Blender foundation. That provides a central coordinating entity and a strong funding model. That structure lets them pay developers but also to work with industry very effectively. FreeCAD is a very different beast. It has been 100% volunteer open-source from the start. There's no foundation (yet) and no developers being paid to work on it. By the way, This video has almost 9000 views. RealThunder has less than 200 patrons on patreon. If people _really_ wanted to see solutions faster, they would support his work and the work of other developers.
@@sliptonic I didn't say anything about incompetence. I think they just need to take a breath, set better roles, stop the "feature creep" (is a "mythical man month"), establish a comprehensive UI/UX plan and workflow with a volunteer in such field, and create a feasible roadmap: less is more when refactoring or when you start from the scratch. Once stablished, you can scale and leverage accordingly. The cad kernel is already there (OpenCascade/Coin3D), so they can continue focusing in the outer layer. By the way, OpenGL is now a dead end, thus it should be also taken into consideration in the foreseeable future (Vulkan API). Another limiting factor is macOS, a niche and closed walled garden which detract a lot of development effort and resources. Therefore It might not be a bad idea to drop support for such a fruity platform.
@@paco3447 It sounds like you understand development but from a commercial perspective. This is FOSS. For example, who's the 'they' you refer to? Everything you described is great practice if you have a formal organization to 'set roles', 'establish plans' and 'make roadmaps'. But FreeCAD, like most open-source projects is a loose affiliation of volunteers. We can't compel anyone to work on a particular feature. I can make roadmaps all day but developers will work on what they want to work on. Ultimately, the only thing the core-developers can do is accept or reject pull requests. Sure, we can collaborate with each other (we do) and work in a logical way but unless someone steps up to do the work, it doesn't get done. In organizations like Blender, they at least have the alternative of paying someone to do the work.
@@sliptonic Well. I must admit is a challenge then. And yep, reviewing a huge pile of pull request is a pain. I don't know... maybe create a naked bare metal branch could be a starting point to put gradually la mise en place. Cheers.
This one has been there forever. Then in v19 they broke the parametric equation editor, so it can't give a list of field names. So parametric CAD with wonky equation editor and the shape naming issue. The more you are in it the more you will curse, but it is free and works enough to be useful. But when it breaks, wow, painful.
@@yash1152 it is raised. Well known issue, discussed since early in v19 beta cycle.. Just read their site. Simple for you to reproduce. Fire up v18 and use equation editor to refer to a named constraint you've defined, like sketch.Constraints.widgetLenght. As you type, it will filter to correct name. Fire up v19. Do the same. It gives a bunch of unscoped values, but won't show your desired on until you completely type the full constraint name. I think it came in from them working to allow references across files. It seems to also match anywhere in the name instead of only from the start. All fine ideas, but it should have been fixed before v19 went final. It certainly had to have failed regression tests.
We have used Freecad in a professional environment for years, and TNP is not a huge issue if the model is precisely designed. The program always does what it should do, it is human mindset what "means" something different. If you just cast operator over operator, any feature based cad model will collapse eventally when modifying an early feature - simply because your intention with a feature, cannot always be guessed by the program. Do you want to keep the hole on the round face, or the top face? Or the yellow one? The only question is: how far the program can take you before it happens. Without algorithmic thinking, one better use some sculpting program anyway - the excellent Blender for one. On the one hand I am looking forward to having TNP managed, on the other hand - with all due respect - "intuitive" programs make lazy people even more lazy.
The topological naming bug in FreeCAD seems to be a fundamental flaw preventing sketching on faces, which is easy to do in most all other CAD software. The work around seems to be to always create a datum plane equal to the face. If this is true, the fix for this problem seems relatively easy. FreeCAD has to know the size, location, and orientation of a face. As soon as the user selects a face to sketch on, FreeCAD should AUTOMATICALLY create and generate a datum plane on the face, BASED ON ORIGIN as opposed to face, which automatic datum plane is left permanent and independent of the face unless the user deletes the datum plane, whether the face changes or not. All relevant sketching seemingly done on the face is actually done on the datum plane, which is dependent on origin, not face, which was originally used to define the datum plane. These are the steps done manually to work around this problem - why can't FreeCAD do this internally automatically ?
Problem with that is parametric changes to the face are no longer propagated to the position of that sketch. To do this correctly the datum plane would need to be linked to the face somehow and then the problem is back. What they need to do is treat faces linked to other geometry more carefully. When new faces are added to a geometry don't just trash the existing faces and start again from scratch but calculate new faces to insert into the existing list. This is how literally every other cad software works but it adds complexity to the code for amending geometry which is probably why they shy away from it in FreeCAD. The most embarrassing part is that a lone developer has done the work for them yet they can't be bothered to commit resources to integrating those fixes.
No, other CAD software actually does the same, it just implements a bunch of guessing-functions to assign existing names to what it thinks is a corresponding face in the model after the operation. That sometimes works, but sometimes it doesn't. Sketching on features and then adding operations that change the number of faces in a model (like chamfers or fillets) is risky in any CAD software.
Referencing faces is very convenient and intuitive but it's really bad practice, it shouldn't be encouraged even with the topological naming algorithm. It can break anyway, topology naming is very complex and outright impossible to make it maintain the references 100% of the time. I remember my instructor strongly disencouraging sketching on faces or using them for operations when I learned CATIA, a very pro and proprietary CAD program with a good topological naming algorithm and I still broke my model countless times by referencing faces because I was lazy.
version 0.20 is "nought point twenty", not "nought point two", it's not a decimal number, it just looks like one. it's eighteen minor versions ahead of nought point two (0.2) that was published in 2005 also… it's not "fundamentally broken" if it's obviously fixable, has already been fixed by a third party, and will be fixed in the core version in the foreseeable future?
Yes, Freecad, even the latest nightly build. is broken when it comes to the Topological Naming issue but if you use a Datum plane as the basis of all new sketches NOT using faces or vertices, then there is no issue. It's a workaround yes, but using this methology will give you a profession CAD tool for free! When the developers finally get around to fixing the issue in the code, then we can stop using datum planes.
Is that what the TNP is about ? I can understand it when an upstream change would cause a feature to no longer exist,and that that would make a sketch based off that feature unviable. That makes sense. I didn't know the problem was so basic,though. Let me get this straight: a body maintains a list of numbered faces, and the faces in that list can move around at any time. I mean isn't it bloody obvious that if an object has say 8 faces, and you add another one, it just /adds another one/, presumably called 'face 9'. Why TF does it need to renumber all the existing ones. Similarly, if you delete face 4 out of nine, then just delete it. It would appear that FC renumbers all the faces above 4, to be one lower. Why ? Why do the faces need to have a monotonically increasing list of numeric names ? The way FreeCAD does this is like having a C compiler that passes parameters to a function in a certain order but commits the called function to always expecting the parameters in the 9riginal order. I mean it must be the user's fault for not keeping track of the stack offsets of the various parameters, right Either these face numbers are opaque, and we shouldn't be basing scripts of them, or they are transparent, and their naming is conserved across deletions and additions. I knew the TNP was bad. I didn't know it was due to such an elementary design fault. It's like renumbering 100+ houses in a street just because one gets built or denolished, and just expecting the postman and ask your correspondents automatically know!
Hi Having been on the same freecad learning journey I two have had the same issues with sketching on plains, For me it manifested itself on sheet metal where I wasn’t able to sketch on a face created by the sheet metal bend function.
sooner have a downloadable piece of software with a few quirks than a cloud based package that needs 24/7 net acces to be useable or that they can pull at a whim. I agree with what you say in the video 100%, and yeah this is a big big issue, and I could be wrong but I think the renaming of the faces should be a small fix hopefully not too far in the future.
Wow. I tried to teach myself FreeCAD when my educational license for Fusion ended. I came to the conclusion that FreeCAD was unusable (to me) because I simply had no idea this was an issue and didn't stumble upon it this knowledge early on. If I had known this was the reason at the start, I likely would have stuck with it. I'm going to give it another try. I had no doubt it was good quality software, I honestly thought I was just terrible at CAD. I'm a software engineer by trade and have no professional experience in CAD though I have familiarity with modelers.
Being only a couple of months into FreeCAD, I know this problem all too well... Despite using RealThunder's branch, I still end up creating a save file everytime I add a layer (sketch, pad, pocket, etc), because many-many-many times, I need to go back to one of those steps and start building up again because things break easily when I tweak something and half my model might suddenly no longer render... It's super frustrating, and I wish it weren't the case because I do quite like what it has to offer and I have perservered to make some really cool 3d-printed parts with it.
Thank you very much for making this video! I've been putting up with FreeCAD for a long time, just because it is free. I've often wished that the developers of Blender and KiCAD would take over the FreeCAD project.
KiCAD has a whole bunch of breaking bugs as well. And add to that a huge bucket of U.I. incostencies making each part of KiCAD hard to work with. Yes I use KiCAD primarily for my electronic projects. The devs of KiCAD should work on their stuff before tackling another huge project.
@@sysghost Kicad is much better than FreeCAD. Like on the scale of Gimp to Blender, Freecad is closer to Gimp and Kicad closer to blender. To be fair, recent Kicad has added so much good stuff, especially renamble power symbols.
That is really not a software issue or a "bug" necessarily, it's a methodology problem. As you say, origin based is the correct method. This is true even for small parts because you want to do a part once, not redo over and over - stability is king. New users should learn this from the start. Much worse is the lack of truly flexible multi-body. If you want to do "quick intuitive" 3D then use Sketchup or 123D. Building geometry on the surfaces of other geometry is a road leading to disaster - at least professionally.
It's so sad that its now 0.21 and not only is this not fixed, but none of the other major problems with FreeCAD are fixed either. You still can't create multiple bodies/features from the same sketch, still no midpoint constraint, auto constraints still work terribly requiring a ton of busy work and the list goes on and on. It really feels like the priorities are just off or some stubbornness with acknowledging serious issues, instead opting to call everything a skill issue is really holding FreeCAD back. I mean just look at how nicely every person talking about it has to be when criticizing it to quell to mega toxic community. FreeCAD literally makes me ok with giving Autodesk money, and I hate that...... The fact its been 2 years since this video released and its still just as bad really doesnt give me hope itll ever not be bad.
The fact that over 2 years later, this is still a huge issue with the software. I'm in the middle of learning how to transition from Fusion to FreeCad, using FreeCad 0.21.2 and this is becoming a huge pain in the ass. I'm working on translating my Fusion designs over to FreeCad and everything just keeps breaking. I'd rather spend the $1500 or whatever it costs to buy Fusion rather than deal with these FreeCad headaches at this point.
Does any other CAD tool have this "problem"? By the way, it may be some kind of logical problem. But there are many such fundamental problems that software developers solve. That's what software is for, to solve problems. Why don't the FreeCAD developers fix this? Don't they want to deal with it? Or are there problems with the architecture of FreeCAD and you would have to rebuild large parts to fix the problem? I mean FreeCAd is being actively developed, there must be a reason why this problem is not prioritised.
I am a former employe of Dassault Systèmes and used Catia V5 since about 20 years (plus UG, Inventor, Blender, Fusion, etc). So glad to see such an amazing open source software as FreeCad. Amazing work done by the community. However, it makes me sick to hear here and there from users people talking about "Good practice" when in fact it is work around and silly tedious contortions for a massive issue other CAD softwares deal prefectly with since eons. If a parametric software CAN'T deal with topological naming correctly... well... it is NOT a parametric CAD. Glad to hear that a non official branch solved most of the issues, but knowing the problems with files compatibility from one version to the other in freecad, let's hope this set of fixes will be integrated in the official version soon and make finally Freecad dominates. I teach FreeCad and seriously, other than that issue, it is amazing!
NO, NO, NO!!
Working with named topological is in fact the dirty work around , no matter if it was established 20 years ago. And it`s the main cause why we cant exchange parametric models to this day!
The way FreeCAD currently forces you to work really is best practice - when whole parts of your model depend on a previous part no CAD program can actually handle a change to that part exactly the way you want every single time - where forcing you to use some functions and set everything on working planes offset from the origin is entirely dependable, as long as you get those formulas right the part will only shift in the way you want with changes to the parameters in older parts.
That said its is just so convenient to bolt the next bits onto the existing model and in most cases works well enough, even with FreeCADs wonkyness, that who needs best practice most of the time (Plus the whole formula for repositioning of the working planes starts making just using OpenSCAD seem like a winner).
Incompatibilities with other versions are caused by new features witch are not presented in older versions. Taking a model made with FreeCAD 0.18 to 0.2 works as i know.
It is not non-official branch because he is involving the debugging of official FreeCAD especially on topo issue. And the branch is updated in compliance with official release from time to time.
Has this unofficial contribution been integrated yet?
Considering RealThunder's patches are going to be implemented in the main branch eventually, it stands to reason that FreeCAD will perform somewhat like RealThunder's current branch at some point in the future. I say go for it with the RealThunder branch videos for now. Irrespective of obsolescence, things move so quickly these days anyway, we might as well make the most of the FOSS software we have now, while we can!
Here we are two years later and this naming issue is still not imported into the official FreeCAD code base.
@@schrodingerscat1863 FreeCAD needs a hero. Musescore and Audacity were "saved" by Tantacrul (Martin Keary) in recent years. We need more people like him to help drive innovation within the FOSS Engineering software branches. Who could help save FreeCAD, do you think?
@@schrodingerscat1863 Still waiting lol
Finding this comment is absolutely hilarious because this hasnt happened and its been 2 years, and Ive seen like 2 other niche unstable branches people swear are going to be integrated into mainline any second now. Freecad really does have a big problem.
@@BeefIngot Seems my comment was deleted since I referenced a video. Developers are actively working on it and it will be released in the next few months alongside v1. Ondsel and the nightly builds confirm this.
If freecad wants to become the CAD standard, it has to fix a BUNCH of quality of life issues.
Amen. I want to see it get there but it seems like a long way to go yet.
@@superchroma We have seen the start and the graph will be on for next
From my perspective, FreeCad will NEVER become the CAD standard, Makers graph of the learning curve is completely wrong, the overhang on the graph should be right at the beginning, I've worked, as an amateur, with Solidworks, Alibre, TurboCad, BobCad and others over the past 30+ years and, while I recognize the capabilities of Freecad _if_ you can get past the initial stages, most just give up in frustration after the first week. Freecad has to get to be more user friendly
@@L98fiero Coming from Fusion360, once I got on a roll, I got mildly dangerous in a short amount of time due entirely to Maker Tales videos. I tried the rest, and found the best here. It is my lifeline to getting anything done in FreeCAD. Just before getting into FreeCAD, I tried SelfCAD and it was an immediate disaster. If you think FreeCAD is intimidating, SelfCAD was all over the place with community-lead support. I bailed fast when I started having tremors based on its overcomplication. The SelfCAD people were like, "Don't run away, tells us your problems." The problems were too great for me to think anything I could say about their fundamental flaws would bear results.
Indeed. FreeCAD needs a "Blender 2.8-like" glow-up.
I hated Blender before 2.8, but now I absolutely love it. FreeCAD can do this too!!
I'm also one of the developers. Thanks for tackling this in a respectful and educational way instead of just throwing shade. Your video is a really good explanation of the topological naming 'problem'. -- I disagree with you on that particular point. It isn't a 'silly bug' or something easily overcome. (If it was that easy, it would have been resolved long ago). It's called a 'problem' because the issue is intrinsic to parametric modeling. It can never be 'solved', only mitigated and avoided. In fact, if you know what you're doing, you can trigger a parametric model to break in _any_ parametric modeling software. Admittedly, most software handles/avoids it better than FreeCAD does currently but I don't think it's possible to ever say it's 'solved'. Realthunder's linkstage is a huge improvement and I can't wait to see his fixes become part of FreeCAD.
I don't have good advice for you about how to make your videos. I would suggest that you should always stress good design principles which avoid breaking models. That means all the techniques you mentioned.
Thanks for doing this and keeping the discussion professional.
I see how this problem is intrinsic to parametric modeling but I also belive that measures can be taken to mitigate this. Maybe it can't be fixed 100 % but 90 % would do it. even 50 % would be great.
@@TheYear2525 Absolutely! We can (and should) continue to improve the reliability of the software. Whenever possible we should make it resistant to breaking models. But robust software isn't a panacea for bad design practices. CAD is hard and designing models that are flexible and resilient requires practice and discipline.
I don't think anyone in the FreeCAD community thinks that topo-naming isn't an issue. It has been acknowledged and discussed for a long time. Our critics have sometimes suggested that we should accept a weak (50%?) solution _now_ rather than a better (90%) solution _later_. As users, that's understandable but as developers we have to consider the long-term health and maintainability of the code base.
Fortunately we have a very talented developer in @Realthunder and a very strong solution is on the horizon.
I am not a coder so I cannot judge this at all - but the problem of TNP is something I leaned just recently in freecad while I just and teach Fusion360 I never came across it. Of course features can get references lost and then you refresh it. That was never a big issue nor breaking the model.
So I hope that at one point freecad can get closer and improve also how people can work safely.
Amazing your guys do - for a free application the tool set is very impressive.
I think one of the things that throws off most beginners with using FreeCAD is they equate "parametric modeling" to being able to go in and change any parameter and have it just work. We expect the ability to go into the sketches or the parameter list and modify them without breaking the models. I had a client once wanting to change his models based off the measurements entered into a linked TechDraw document. So, yea, I know the general public is sometimes asking for too much because they can have unrealistic expectations too.
I use FC once in a while to design very simple parts for 3D printing. I don't have much CAD experience, but made my living before retirement as a software engineer. Clearly this problem is a serious design flaw, whether or not "bug" is the right term for it. I have read quite a few forum threads etc. on this, and have often encountered comments to the effect that, well, you shouldn't use CAD software that way anyway. Also, there are plenty of remarks to the effect that this is a hard problem to solve.
It may be a difficult problem to solve, but a lot of comments excusing FC miss an important point. Take the "simple" example in this video that demonstrates the problem (three stacked rectangular bits). If, to a human user, the identity of the faces,, or features, is clearly retained through the edit, and the intended result is conceptually clear to a human, then there is a software solution to the problem. If the software does not produce expected results which can be clearly defined by the human user, the software is WRONG. I acknowledge that (software implementation aside) there may be cases in which an alteration or transformation creates ambiguity about the identity of the resulting geometry, and what would constitute "correct" results. But that is clearly not so for many simple instances where the topological naming problem creates unexpected, and clearly wrong results. So really, there is no good reason to accept the current behaviour and work around it, at least not for long.
Again ... it's Free. You would have a valid complaint if you spent $3,500.00 USD
@@rogersmith5183 The point is not about whether complaints about FC are valid or invalid, or whether the software is free or costs money. The point is that the topological naming problem is a design error, not a user-practice error.
@@djpenton779 Actually, my point is that highly productive work can be done with FreeCad even with the "bugs"... and for free. I have been involved in software design and programming of some sort since about 1981. There are "bugs" in every piece of software. Ask Willie Gates.
@@djpenton779 Anyone who uses Modeling CAD software knows that the "topological naming problem" is an issue with a number of CAD packages - if not all at one point during development. I think the video should have been just about the topic, rather than dissing a single product. "FreeCAD is Broken..!" Really? The thumbnail alone begs the potential user to search for an alternative. You are correct - stick to the point, rather than single out a product.
My guy, just use fusion and stop wasting your time. I assure you your time is more valuable than experiencing this.
Please teach us how to use FreeCAD in it's current state, even with the workarounds. Why? Because even with the inconveniences, it still makes CAD design accessible to those of us who can't afford the Fusion tools at their ridiculously high prices. When and if FreeCAD fixes their bugs, you can still do new videos. It's better to have useful info on a cumbersome product, than to be able to use no product at all.
Siemens Solid Edge with it's Community Edition (this means everyone, even people that is not a student or does not have a business can use this edition) by far is a better option, you can even get certificated for free.
I hate both Fusion 360 and FreeCad so seeing a complete software like Solid Edge for free was a take of fresh air for me.
Only limitations:
2D draws are watermarked
You can't open your design on professional edition of SolidEdge
Topology Optimization can only react to Force but no press or torque
@omegadeepblue1407 will this version be free forever or can Siemens pull the rug at any moment?
RealThunders branch!! Focus on core features as they will apply to future releases. Waiting for the series :-)
A Video about the Datum Plan Workflow sounds really useful. I don’t think that video would become outdated, when the topological naming problem is solved. Sounds more like a useful concept that could be handy in tricky situations.
I'd go with realthunder tutorials and the crossover, thanks for the videos
I do CAD works occasionally and I'm getting to know FreeCad lately. I like it! And yes, I also fall into that "bug" once. When it happened I didn't realise what sort of sorcery happened in front of my eyes and just removed shapes and stacked them up again. Not a big deal. Wish not to pile up things in some bigger project though...
I watched this video a few days after taking your freecad turorial. About 2 months in working with FreeCAD, I started experiencing this issue while editing bodies and I kept this information in mind. It really helped me not lose my mind knowing this has nothing to do with my skills but a limitation of the tool itself
Let's go for origin and datum tutorials. It's a skill that never gets obsolete and makes you a better modeler on ANY cad :)
I was on the design team for the B-1B armament and weapons loader trainer, designer of the ejection seat inert training modules. some how a real ejection seat munitions module got int the training room and on to an ejection seat. No one was in the seat and they were showing what handle to pull and it went off sending the ejection seat thru the roof of the hanger.
There was about 10-15 different modules. I accomplished the project that was adopted air force wide.
I started out as a apprentice manual machinist at a local textile factory and went to work at Kelly AFB and was a journeyman machinist until I got into drafting and became a draftsman. I then went to Randolph AFB as a engineering tech and worked on the B1-B project till it finished and retired at 56 yrs old.
We were on computer vision software and did 3D wire frame design. I'm starting my small machine shop up and needed a cad program for an 82 going on 83 yr old man.
I'm having a learning curve on FreeCAD as my mind is still thinking computer vision. But come hades or high water I'm gonna win..
Godspeed 💪🏻
Is FreeCAD 0.20 Broken? Find out here: ua-cam.com/video/U6W0ipxzKBE/v-deo.html
A huge thank you for all your comments and I love to read through them all! (So keep commenting I love to know your thoughts on this)
For the time being, I have gone with the majority decision of starting a course with Real Thunders Branch: ua-cam.com/video/p_ZEry2wTfg/v-deo.html
Once freeCAD updates I'll also be making a new course then.
And don't worry you hardcore veterans and engineers my plan is to teach the basics first and then I'll show the origin and datum plain referencing workflow.
Coming from using Creo (aka Pro/E) at work, FreeCAD makes me want to bash my face into my keyboard over and over.
Well it is developed by freelancers and for that they did a fantastic job - but that does not make the lacking tools easier - just learned today that there is no find intersection point in sketcher …
@@glenndoiron9317 Also a previous CREO user here. I completely sympathize with your experience.
@@ChainsawDNA why have you moved away from Creo?
@@paulreader1777, Creo's free/eval version was very limited in the formats that it could export. You couldn't even export to the paid version of Creo, which to me was an absurd.
Wow. Hard to understand how it ever even got out of beta with a bug like that.
This *exact* bug has literally driven me to tears of frustration.
Like, I was trying to design a fan duct for a 3d printer. My boss wanted me to change a "few little things". *Every single time* I changed anything, it would run into this exact issue. It got to the point where it just was less of a hassle for me to just delete the sketches I made until I get to the semi starting point, then re-make the sketches *with* those changes baked in. Honestly, this kind of thing is a major reason why I still have zero patience for FreeCAD any time any minor thing goes wrong.
I think being able to go back and change something is the real measure of a good CAD package. FreeCAD just sucks.
@@andyspoo2 FreeCAD is at the rather frustrating intersection between "quite capable of a lot of things," "free" and "having some glaring issues." For a free piece of software, it's just nice enough to justify using, but also frustrating enough that you don't want to spend too much time wrestling with it.
@@ray30k Agreed.
@@ray30k Hey, blender got past that stage, I'm sure free cad will eventually.
@@davidwarford3087 Blender never had the problem of arbitrarily renaming the canonical names of objects. It boggles my mind any system would ever do that, honestly. How is that not obviously the wrong way to do it?
Problems like this made me stay with Fusion 360, even after the license change...
Several years ago when looking at cad programs, I took one look at the fusion 360 license terms, foresaw pretty much what happened, and went elsewhere. Losing full access to my own design drawings because of a software and license update was not a risk I was willing to take.
You don't even have full access to your own designs? I knew Autodesk was shit, but damn
@@EddoWagt A situation I avoided by not using fusion 360. The risk exists any time your files are not on your hardware, or depends on software that could be "upgraded" without your control.
@@EddoWagt You do actually have full access. The "issue" is that you can only edit 10 files at a time... Which basically means you can only have 10 tabs open. In order to edit them you need to click a lock button in order to make them uneditable to free up your slots.
That said, you technically can have more than 10 files open simultaneously, you just can't edit more than 10 at once... Which outside of some insane setups isn't much of a limit. Annoying, yes, limiting? No.
And if instead @hanelp1 is talking about fusion 360 saving everything to the cloud, it isn't hard to save the files to your computer and to load them that way. (Export instead of save.)
@@SirSpence99 I feel it's pretty easy to reach that 10 file limit
@@SirSpence99 Well, let's see how well your post ages after the next license change.
I just tested FreeCAD 0.20 for this bug, and it is still present. Seems the only option at this point is to use the fixed fork.
Thanks for testing this; guess I'll keep watching this series as is, haha
I've been thinking about switching from Fusion to FC but then I came across this video. It's now two years old- has this issue been fixed yet?? This would definitely be a dealbreaker for me.
There was a fork of freecad with this fixed and as far as i know they still trying to incorporate fix for main branch, if you don't have VERY good reason to switch, don't switch, freecad is a pain overall. I would even say that paid fusion is chaper than freecad when you take into consideration that your work time is worth more than 0$/h
Same there for Siemens NX: As a power user, I can say that for robust models you should AVOID referencing on faces or edges. The robustness hierarchy is :
1. coordinate systems
2. planes
3. faces
4. edges
Long time Creo Parametric user here, while what you say is fundamentally right, CAD software is evolving in the direction of being as robust while doing some of the under the hood work for the user. For a simple three level pyramid as in the video, one can of course build a datum planes and coordinate systems structure before "filling" it with parts, but since when I started dabbling with parametric solid CAD in the early 2000s there was really no need for using such a complex structure for such a simple part.
When the software needs the user to work around it's faults then it was designed by an idiot.
Sometimes can be a real PITA to create a datum plane over a face created by arbitrary cuts with unknown angle.
At the end I was forced to make my own trigonometric calcs before start drawing the next shape/feature. This is not using a CAD system, but a perverse form of self-torture...
@@MsSomeonenew
Soo all software is made by idiots, cause just by interacting with it you are working in its confines.
@@rockytom5889 Confines != faults.
Has the current stable version 0.20.2 of freeCAD fixed this issue or is it still advisable to use the Realthunder branch? Thanks
It's still completely broken. They're working on TNP for a long time.
There is a branch that actually already fixes it and is currently incorporated into the main branch.
What it doesn't solve: inconsistencies, permanent crashes, stupid behaviour, things breaking randomly and overall agony when trying to use it.
I've spent (better wasted) the last two years "learning" it. It's complete and utter dog shit, which I am very very very sad about.
It could've been a good tool.
But there is a reason why it is still in beta after OVER TWENTY YEARS in development.
To make sure I'm not being misunderstood: I've put far over 200h into FreeCAD. I can't even estimate how much. I've been using it for over 2 years now. It's dog shit and I'm slowly losing patience with it. If you want to be productive: pay for some commercial tool and save yourself from wasting hours and hours of your lifetime.
It's not worth it.
Anyone watching this in 2023+ ... 0.20.2 was released on schedule and works well.
We are currently using 0.21 (Beta) for a large Architectural model and it's been great. 😍
FreeCAD certainly has quirks and steep learning curve but it's worth the effort to learn and us it. Beats paying obscene amounts to RENT closed source software.
If the only free option is FreeCad then i prefer piracy.
And a year later, 0.2 is out, and no joy. So sad. Meanwhile, more and more people are moving to the RealThunder branch. Not a good sign for the official open source version. Why isn’t this priority #1? Amazing.
This is the nature of open source, if the main branch isn't going in a good direction then someone can create a fork and create something better.
I've tried a number of CAD programs. There's a vast disconnect between the way their programmers expect a drawing and an object to be created and how an experienced design engineer does so. They're far too pedestrian and inhibit creativity.
I have to agrre with the community part. Since i came from solidworks, i was just giving an idea for frecad development, i ended up banned from freecad forum. I still love freecad but is sad that this happens.
If you want to develop a open source software, you have to know what the industry uses and what tools it needs. Most features asked and solved for blender come from Maya or 3ds users tham came to Blender. This is really important. SO in conclusion, if we want a really robust cad software, all critics and sugestions diserves attention (like this vide) So the development can grows faster
I agree 100%. Are you familiar with GIMP? How many years did they refuse to adhere to ANY standards, intuition or oven common sense? They changed some things for the better but the UI is still light-years away from anything you want to use for more then basic tasks. The sad thing is, under the hood GIMP is really gold. Only the UI sucks soooo bad, its not even real.
@@shoeoffhead3692 I'm familiar with gimp, I use it professionally ;) only used Adobe on university but I changed to gimp
@@shoeoffhead3692 and new UI is under development, altought you can already test it
I use different CAD software depending on the model I need to make and the purpose of it. I really like the FreeCAD spreadsheet function, and I was comfortable using datum plane referencing from the beginning, but it was tedious before they added the ability to set certain plane offsets with spreadsheet functions. At this point, I can usually create whatever I want unless it contains fillets. The name topology absolutely ruins these to the point where the fillet needs to be the last operation in your part, after which you can never edit anything again.
Since Fusion360 added in more restrictions for the free version, I've moved away to Solid Edge, which is basically magic for editing step files. I'm still not super used to the workflow of editing so many things in 3D instead of sketches, but I find that CAD skills are transferable regardless of the software you choose.
Looking back, 0.2 did not fix it.
For me as a beginner it means I never had any benefit from parametric designs as an anyway have to fix the models after a change along the tree.
So most of the time it is better not to reference external geometry as it will only create a cascade of Desaster.
I would buy fusion, but I do not want an Abo or a free version that may be gone next week.
So FreeCad is my program but yes it slows down my idea flow because I spend most of the time to search the way to calculate absolute positions
On another point, the best way for a free cad program to spur adoption is to open itself to customization in UI so that it can be refamiliarized for people transitioning from other CAD softwares. I really can't stress how underestimatedly important that is. Shortcuts, button placement, mouse controls, etc is really what makes or breaks it for being able to fluidly jump from different programs.
There are a number of mods out there, VertUI and ModernUI etc?
Stick with using realthunder and move forward with your videos. What you teach using it will likely carry over into he freecad branch.
with all due respect, that's not a bug nor a problem. if you learn creo, solidworks, fusion 360, you have your own methods of doing things, freecad has it's own. we used creo in uni, and i honestly, find FreeCAD better.
I think FreeCad is fundamentally good. It was never broken but it does/did take an effort to learn to drive properly. The more I learn about it, the more power I find it has. I accept that other 3D modelling programmes are available. As a retired engineer I find Freecad's clean presentation a bonus.
It is broken, the way they link sketches to named faces that can move around causes all kinds of problems needing work arounds all over the place. The RealThunder fork fixes this issue though and gives a much better user experience.
I don’t like the freecad dev community. Once I said (based on my younger self) that even the logo was a bit old looking. The first time I tried to use 3D cad software I fell in love with fusion 360 just based on its appearance. I asked them if the logo could be changed to get more users and they treated me like a dumb boy, they were very disrespectful and said that “you don’t use cad software for its looking but for its functionality and if you think better looking is important you are not the expected public for this software”. Ok, that might be true with experienced modelers, but for newcomers that’s something really important, I guess. When you see an old logo it makes you feel like it’s old software (it’s crap). Even if I was wrong they could have said something like “Ok, that’s something we might consider” that’s it. They made me feel bad that day 😂
It is not good practice to use surfaces as reference planes, you should use datum planes for this purpose as it can cause issues with complex designs even though it works in NX /SW / Caria. You should teach the use of origin and planes as references as this is often required in large company environments
1:58 It's silly to compare a free software with a CAD that costs $1,635 (paid every 3 years) 🤣
Honestly, have you considered ditching FreeCAD altogether? Onshape is free and much better
I want to use FreeCAD when I need to use a solid modelling type program vs. the surface modelling program I usually use. Thanks for letting me know about this issue. I did try to learn FreeCAD but haven't had much time to really get in to it. I ran across an issue with just trying to scale a part. It wouldn't let me do it. It wanted me to make a copy of the part I had created then would let me scale the copy. I wanted to scale the original as I realized I used the wrong units when I started the model. For now, I continue to do most of my work in Rhinoceros 3D.
I haven been using some 3D modeling software long before I got into 3D printing and encountered Freecad. And I thought "What the hell is wrong with this program? Why does editing the shapes you made your object of end in breaking it all at least 50 % of the time?". To edit things I then used to delete the last step(s) and do it all over. Then I discovered re-referencing. Still it's unbelivable that this hasn't been fixed years ago. This is not how things are suposed to work. Your comparison with a cliff actually totally expresses how it feels. Although technically your cliff function, that isn't a real function, would take you back in time xD .
Has this problem been solved? We're at freecad 0.20.2 now.
Freecad is annoying...I gave up after 3 months ...stupid
Freecad is so bloated it's breaking itself all the time. Disappearing objects etc, effing annoying.
This bug is exactly why I said "Fuck this! I'm already using Blender, can't I just CAD model in there?", and that's how I found your channel and Blender Precision series!
Exactly this, it feel we hit full circle now. DItch it, and back to Blender, where we started being happy!
This! So much of exactly this!
Well not a lot of what freecad can do Blender can remotely do. No trimming clean surface no fillets on trimmed edges no parametric modeling.
Blender and freecad are two very different things
@@cekuhnen And that's why I kept using Freecad despite this stupid "bug".
@@cekuhnen
How to do everything you just mentioned in Blender:
-Trimming: use boolean or knife modifier (Depends on desired accuracy and complexity)
-Fillet: use bevels and increase the face count.
-Parametric modelling: There's literaly a modifiers tab and you can edit everything from the geometry in edit mode from a panel without needing to use any gizmos, just parameters.
Don't say blender can't do it, just put a bit more effort into learning and you'll see the tools are there. Besides, if you lack anything, Blender being free there's always a plugin out there that will add it... and considering how blender is with its modifier workflow you can basically ignore that and work entirely with the tools it gives you.
And it's still "broken" in 2024!
that is unbelievably stupid. If you are thinking otherwise, think again.
The beauty of FreeCad is there's more than one way to accomplish the same thing. Just make three separate sketches and merge them when you're done. No bugs, easy af.
Yeah but what if these 3 sketches were not parallel
@@РоманПлетнев-г3э Then you can rotate the object or manually adjust the angle of an axis in the object.
Origin and datum tutorials. And teach the RealThunder branch.
Great video! I am looking for the good CAD program for my channel, which works on Mac. Unfortunately it does not exist.
Whilst the TNP is a serious issue for FreeCAD I don't see how it can ever be totally solved in any parametric editor of this type. If you daisy chain off faces, what happens if you go back in to an earlier stage and make a change that removes a face something else is built on? So whilst I agree FreeCAD doesn't handle it that well and designs can fall apart after changes that shouldn't cause that, even if fixed as far as possible, some structural care is needed.
Does anyone know if this solved? Current version are 0.20.
Yes, I came to the same conclusion. Broken. I found there was little consistency between the UI for different menus. Its as if 20 different menus were written by 21 different coders - each with their own interpretation of how the UI should work. It looks great from the outside until you start trying to do something real with it.
Openscad (Parametric CAD) is far more useful productive and consistent. You code up what you want the package to do.
I also using Blender 3.1 and settled on that
Can't you just add a plane to the face that you want to reference.
Another year in production with 0.2. I’m happy with it
Well... how about you donate, fix it yourself or just wait?
I think I ran into this after about 30 minutes in FreeCAD, it made me really not want to bother learning more of the software. If Fusion360 wasn't actively trying to drive away all of the free hobbyists I would probably have stopped completely.
FreeCAD devs, please fix this bug so my Windows friends using Fusion 360 will stop laughing at me... :|
Minor correction, it's FreeCAD 0.20 (o point twenty) the version number is not a decimal but a MAYOR_VERSION.MINOR_VERSION naming scheme so trailing zeros should not be omitted. FreeCAD 0.2 came out a loooong time ago.
Major, not mayor. What is with FreeCad folks saying "mayor"? You're not the only one. And it really should be Major.Minor.Patch to follow semver standards, in which case the version would be 0.20.0. They do this with their github releases, just very inconsistently. It's weird.
In my case my native language is Spanish where there is a very similar word that is actually spelled mayor, could have been my own mistake or Spanish autocorrect, given how it's written here it's most likely my mistake. Can't speak for anybody else. Regarding inconsistent versioning, yes I have complained about this myself to the maintainers and worked towards making it more consistent. Either way my point was that trailing 0 should not be omitted.
" but hey, it's Free, that means you can't criticize it ever " 🤣🤣🤣👍I feel like open-source environments are super toxic in general
Bro this Video is Linked on the official wiki for this topic
Is this fixed now? ....here in October 2022
Get hired at free cad… fix bug.. commit to master… quit
This is a major roadblock to Assemblies, as well. The most useful application of Assembly (as in SolidWorks), is to rough out ideas for each part, assemble them, then iteratively refine and correct them as needed. But as soon as you edit a part in FreeCAD, all the face names are scrambled, and the assembly relations are horribly broken. It is EXPECTED that assemblies will reveal changes that need to be made. That's kind of the whole point of CAD-to be able to discover and correct design problems in software, where it's easier. Without a robust and reliable Assembly platform, it will not progress beyond an interesting hobby tool.
that bug is fixed by RealTHunder's Link Stage 3
FreeCAD 0.20.2 bug is still present.
The exact bug you describe discouraged me a great deal
Your concerns are spot on but Freecad already a fundamental problem with its terminology, which makes it far less intuitive than other software. Coming from an FEA background I expected it to be easy to pick up but the last three weeks of me trying to adapt to it have been incredibly frustrating. It is a pig. Perfectly capable but because it has grown with contributors each having different ideas, it has become an overly complex monster that has a steep learning curve regardless of the bugs, once the user starts to push beyond simple sketches and models. I'm sure that many power users love it because of its flaws and nuances but I doubt most users will ever get to that stage.
just name everything "topology"
I'm a Solidworks user and I never use a face as a reference plane. I also try my hardest to never create new planes. I usually work off a Skeleton model that only contains sketches and they are mostly referenced to the top, front or side planes. Things stay much more stable this way especially when you have many parts referencing the skeleton model
In FreeCAD the sketches suffer the same naming problem as the faces of the model. If you edit a sketch and just add one line to it (and not touch any of the existing lines) then all the other lines in that sketch might get renamed. So the skeleton model made out of sketches can crumble pretty easily in FreeCAD.
@@IndrekL oh that's a shame. I can see how that could really make it difficult to use. It's a shame because I would love a free alternative to Solidworks. 1 licence costs more than my car
I have a completely different suggestion: double down on Blender. Most people using Blender love the open source nature and CANNOT use Fusion360 (for whatever reason). Also Blender is more powerful then Fusion in many areas.
I would suggest you pick some of the best beginner/advanced Fusion360 tutorials where they create simple parts. Then you use Blender to imitate the tutorial. I actually did that with a Fusion tutorial. At first I was annoyed but I learned so much:
1. sometimes very similar solutions exist in Blender (which you wouldn't have found otherwise)
2. sometimes you do it completely different (the Blender way)
3. often you do a combination of 1. and 2.
4. modifierers, modifierers, modifierers: you often build entire objects just using modifiers. Therefore fully parameterized!
Maybe in 12-18 months FreeCAD has gotten it ironed out. At the moment its not worth learning stuff that might change in a few months. I also sunk almost a week in FreeCAD. I love it but hate it more ;)
It's worth having your own niche...something like: show people how Blender can be comparable to Fusion360 in many cases.
Great idea. Jonathan has enough experience in Blender to make a playlist of videos where he challenges himself to re-work popular Fusion360 tutorials (links in the description) in Blender. If you pick the right tutorials, Blender can even shine in comparison.
True. If you have enough Blender and CAD Transforms experience, you can do some 3D CAD modelling quicker then Fusion. Also the Blender community is extremely active (compared to FreeCAD). If somebody shows the way, the devs might be swayed to add more CAD functionality in Blender in the future. I have seen similar things happen in the past for other functionality.
Thumbs up from me. It would be an interesting experiment to watch Fusion360 tutorials and then think while you are watching how to do them in Blender. If you have a playlist of a dozen top notch Blender tutorials that do a similar or better job then the videos of the Fusion360-Gurus on UA-cam, people would flock to Blender and your channel as an open-source Fusion alternative.
Many people EVERY DAY turn to 3D printing and CAD. Often they pick Fusion. Then they sink thousands of hours into the software, so obviously it will produce excellent results. Nobody does something similar with Blender. Why? Because they haven't been shown the way!
It's one thing to make good Blender tutorials. People cannot really judge on that basis if Blender is really on the same level as Fusion.
But if you PROOF that you can "copy" top-notch UA-cam Fusion360 tutorials in Blender in the same/similar time with similar/better results, people will pick Blender over Fusion.
In the last 12 month many friends asked me for 3D software advice. I always pointed at your tutorials and some stuck with Blender instead of the widely advertised Fusion. I am 100% sure I could have convinced more if I had a dozen side-by-side tutorials of Fusion vs. Blender, where Blender is equal or better.
I have to agree. The models you build with Blender are impressive: ua-cam.com/play/PL6Fiih6ItYsX8gnnek59lIPrtqnCAyg-o.html
No reason you cannot make a playlist called: "Easy, Advanced and Expert Fusion360 tutorials NOW possible in Blender. Quicker, Better and Open Source!".
Or something shorter and more catchy :P
Fusion has so much publicity, you need to challenge it head on. If people see that Blender is as good as Fusion (e.g. for 3D printing), they will come.
UA-cam recently suggested a few Fusion360 tutorials to me and although I am a Blender guy, I watched them and reproduced some in Blender. Didn't notice any time or quality difference modelling the stuff from the tutorials in Blender.
Somebody reproducing Fusion-Tutorials in Blender doesn't exist. It would be a great learning experience. In the comments we could critique how you could have done things differently/better.
Please do a Fusion-goes-Blender playlist Jonathan! There is real interest in this.
blender can cause issues when trying to 3d print because it works with a different type of 3d modeling (frankly I did not understand the explanation but it can cause downloaded stls to be unprintable) something to do with missing or overlapping faces that causes a problem. some people had fixes, others said they didn't work. can't say I know for sure if it's a significant problem but it seemed like it (plus it was harder to understand blender to me) so I moved to cads
It is fixed now in 0.22!
If you think that Datum Plain workflows will still work in future versions, it would be useful to have them. If it's a good practice across any CAD platform, it's a good thing to teach and a good thing to learn. If a quick and convenient shortcut (building off of faces) comes along in a form where the software does a decent job of protecting a user from their own poor CAD practices, that's fine, teach it when it arrives.
It over complicates models because you end up having to have parametric functions to update the position of the datum plane which has to be added manually. No one is going to want to go through that for basic modelling. You normally wouldn't get into that until you start putting assemblies together.
Seems to be a persistent problem in the open-source world. The software is written by the users, but since they understand it from the inside out, they aren't motivated to fix the problems that new users see from the outside. In some cases it seems they relish that people find the software impenetrable. I haven't yet jumped in to freeCAD, because it does seem to suffer from this problem...
As someone who has just started to use freeCAD and has struggled to try to design a hush-box for my projector I wholeheartedly agree.
Yes, there are tutorials. But I truly struggle to find a good way to build a wooden box... A friggin box. Not an animated articulated industrial robot arm. A goddamn static nonmoving box.
Or just move the camera inside a house without getting polecat syndrome.
And most tutorials I find are just timelapse videos. And even when I find someone that talks. They never say why I should use one tool over another. Or why an approach should not be used in some circumstance. Nothing. So I can't implement their knowledge in other situations.
And the echochamber thinking is probably part of the problem. Because if you know all the steps needed to do the basics you don't want to relearn them, so you get reluctant to implement changes that makes things more intuitive.
I mean. I see the potentials here. I just want to be able to use the tools.
Its good practice to use parameteic reference planes rather than body features so it's not really an issue. This same "issue" occurs in professional and very expensive software too.
I've been using faces as references in Solidworks for well over a decade and never had the slightest problem. Other software can handle this robustly, but you have to pay for it.
Teach FreeCAD as is. Also teach RealThunder's branch. Just make your videos appropriately. Then when the new release finally comes out you'll redo a bunch of the teaching videos but that will keep your channel full of content. Videos become obsolete over time. That's just the way it is. But that also leaves you with plenty of new content to create. Keeping your channel relevant and numbers going up.
I wish FreeCAD was a SketchUp clone.
As a Fusion 360 user I feel amused
This bug is the main reason why I haven't switched from Fusion yet. It just fundamentally breaks the software
Maybe, try Solvespace
At a company that takes cad seriously you wouldn't be allowed to draw straight on a face due to this "bug". Makes the model as stable as a house of cards in a 100km/h storm for future changes.. Just use planes to drive the model and problem goes away...
I was dragged kicking and screaming and forced to briefly use cad (solidworks) at uni. Years later I found myself needing cad for a hobby project (model steam engines). I taught myself freecad and never actually encountered the bug you reference here, partly because I rarely change and object using its history without a fundamental re-design of said object, but mainly because i found only using origin referenced planes kind of necessary to avoid your whole assembly becoming a jumbled mess of incomprehensible parameters. I get that some people might just want a user friendly intuitive piece of software to blitz out a single body for their printer, but multiple such things already exist. I don't see why freecad has to be that, and I certainly don't see it as broken.
Thanks for the explanation. Used to program cad programs as a day job. Nothing easy about it. I would tend to agree with you on the dont put out vids that may be obsolete tutorials in a few months time. My take on this would be make new tutorials using the thunder branch clearly prefacing the video with the fact its not the official branch and link back to this one to explain why. You should try a few complicated workflows in both version and film them with snagit (whatever screen cap soft you use will do). Maybe diff the resultant step files to check how they differ between the official and thunder branch. (I suspect thunder may do this themself). Dont give up on freecad its so powerful and our best chance of preventing complete comercial dominance of fusion and solid worx from being the only options and not having cadcam being only sas.
Also by doing all your workflows twice in both apps you make find thunder some bugs they have missed or conversely help freecad to implement the right fixes back into the official. Hard work but thoroughly worth it if you can get freecad official back on track.
Hey its free.
Im happy with it.
Freecad needs the Blender’s foundation direction and expertise about managing open source projects.
We have friends in the Blender community and they have provided advice often over the years. There's a subtle implication in your comment that FreeCAD's issues are about mismanagement or incompetence. That's not fair (or accurate). FreeCAD is a very different project with a very different history. Blender started life as commercial software. It had paid developers from the beginning. Today they have the Blender foundation. That provides a central coordinating entity and a strong funding model. That structure lets them pay developers but also to work with industry very effectively.
FreeCAD is a very different beast. It has been 100% volunteer open-source from the start. There's no foundation (yet) and no developers being paid to work on it.
By the way, This video has almost 9000 views. RealThunder has less than 200 patrons on patreon. If people _really_ wanted to see solutions faster, they would support his work and the work of other developers.
@@sliptonic I didn't say anything about incompetence. I think they just need to take a breath, set better roles, stop the "feature creep" (is a "mythical man month"), establish a comprehensive UI/UX plan and workflow with a volunteer in such field, and create a feasible roadmap: less is more when refactoring or when you start from the scratch. Once stablished, you can scale and leverage accordingly. The cad kernel is already there (OpenCascade/Coin3D), so they can continue focusing in the outer layer.
By the way, OpenGL is now a dead end, thus it should be also taken into consideration in the foreseeable future (Vulkan API).
Another limiting factor is macOS, a niche and closed walled garden which detract a lot of development effort and resources. Therefore It might not be a bad idea to drop support for such a fruity platform.
@@paco3447 It sounds like you understand development but from a commercial perspective. This is FOSS. For example, who's the 'they' you refer to? Everything you described is great practice if you have a formal organization to 'set roles', 'establish plans' and 'make roadmaps'. But FreeCAD, like most open-source projects is a loose affiliation of volunteers. We can't compel anyone to work on a particular feature. I can make roadmaps all day but developers will work on what they want to work on. Ultimately, the only thing the core-developers can do is accept or reject pull requests.
Sure, we can collaborate with each other (we do) and work in a logical way but unless someone steps up to do the work, it doesn't get done. In organizations like Blender, they at least have the alternative of paying someone to do the work.
@@sliptonic Well. I must admit is a challenge then. And yep, reviewing a huge pile of pull request is a pain. I don't know... maybe create a naked bare metal branch could be a starting point to put gradually la mise en place. Cheers.
....but dont forget blender was a dumpster fire for a long long time
This one has been there forever. Then in v19 they broke the parametric equation editor, so it can't give a list of field names. So parametric CAD with wonky equation editor and the shape naming issue. The more you are in it the more you will curse, but it is free and works enough to be useful. But when it breaks, wow, painful.
@@yash1152 it is raised. Well known issue, discussed since early in v19 beta cycle.. Just read their site. Simple for you to reproduce. Fire up v18 and use equation editor to refer to a named constraint you've defined, like sketch.Constraints.widgetLenght. As you type, it will filter to correct name. Fire up v19. Do the same. It gives a bunch of unscoped values, but won't show your desired on until you completely type the full constraint name. I think it came in from them working to allow references across files. It seems to also match anywhere in the name instead of only from the start. All fine ideas, but it should have been fixed before v19 went final. It certainly had to have failed regression tests.
We have used Freecad in a professional environment for years, and TNP is not a huge issue if the model is precisely designed. The program always does what it should do, it is human mindset what "means" something different. If you just cast operator over operator, any feature based cad model will collapse eventally when modifying an early feature - simply because your intention with a feature, cannot always be guessed by the program. Do you want to keep the hole on the round face, or the top face? Or the yellow one? The only question is: how far the program can take you before it happens. Without algorithmic thinking, one better use some sculpting program anyway - the excellent Blender for one. On the one hand I am looking forward to having TNP managed, on the other hand - with all due respect - "intuitive" programs make lazy people even more lazy.
The topological naming bug in FreeCAD seems to be a fundamental flaw preventing sketching on faces, which is easy to do in most all other CAD software.
The work around seems to be to always create a datum plane equal to the face.
If this is true, the fix for this problem seems relatively easy.
FreeCAD has to know the size, location, and orientation of a face.
As soon as the user selects a face to sketch on, FreeCAD should AUTOMATICALLY create and generate a datum plane on the face, BASED ON ORIGIN as opposed to face, which automatic datum plane is left permanent and independent of the face unless the user deletes the datum plane, whether the face changes or not.
All relevant sketching seemingly done on the face is actually done on the datum plane, which is dependent on origin, not face, which was originally used to define the datum plane.
These are the steps done manually to work around this problem - why can't FreeCAD do this internally automatically ?
Problem with that is parametric changes to the face are no longer propagated to the position of that sketch. To do this correctly the datum plane would need to be linked to the face somehow and then the problem is back. What they need to do is treat faces linked to other geometry more carefully. When new faces are added to a geometry don't just trash the existing faces and start again from scratch but calculate new faces to insert into the existing list. This is how literally every other cad software works but it adds complexity to the code for amending geometry which is probably why they shy away from it in FreeCAD. The most embarrassing part is that a lone developer has done the work for them yet they can't be bothered to commit resources to integrating those fixes.
No, other CAD software actually does the same, it just implements a bunch of guessing-functions to assign existing names to what it thinks is a corresponding face in the model after the operation. That sometimes works, but sometimes it doesn't. Sketching on features and then adding operations that change the number of faces in a model (like chamfers or fillets) is risky in any CAD software.
I always wondered what the hell kept causing this to happen. After watching this now it perfectly describes the issues I've been fighting.
Referencing faces is very convenient and intuitive but it's really bad practice, it shouldn't be encouraged even with the topological naming algorithm. It can break anyway, topology naming is very complex and outright impossible to make it maintain the references 100% of the time. I remember my instructor strongly disencouraging sketching on faces or using them for operations when I learned CATIA, a very pro and proprietary CAD program with a good topological naming algorithm and I still broke my model countless times by referencing faces because I was lazy.
completely agree. If you came to demand for CAD in your life, good habits from the beginning!!!!
But if it is bad practice to reference faces, why is it even possible?
It is the most intuitive way of connecting two sketches.
@@MrJetra for convenience, and sometimes it makes sense, but should not be your first option.
@@MrJetra FreeCAD has good free alternative for such cases: Sketchup. And it rocks!
version 0.20 is "nought point twenty", not "nought point two", it's not a decimal number, it just looks like one. it's eighteen minor versions ahead of nought point two (0.2) that was published in 2005
also… it's not "fundamentally broken" if it's obviously fixable, has already been fixed by a third party, and will be fixed in the core version in the foreseeable future?
Yes, Freecad, even the latest nightly build. is broken when it comes to the Topological Naming issue but if you use a Datum plane as the basis of all new sketches NOT using faces or vertices, then there is no issue. It's a workaround yes, but using this methology will give you a profession CAD tool for free! When the developers finally get around to fixing the issue in the code, then we can stop using datum planes.
Is that what the TNP is about ? I can understand it when an upstream change would cause a feature to no longer exist,and that that would make a sketch based off that feature unviable. That makes sense.
I didn't know the problem was so basic,though. Let me get this straight: a body maintains a list of numbered faces, and the faces in that list can move around at any time. I mean isn't it bloody obvious that if an object has say 8 faces, and you add another one, it just /adds another one/, presumably called 'face 9'. Why TF does it need to renumber all the existing ones. Similarly, if you delete face 4 out of nine, then just delete it. It would appear that FC renumbers all the faces above 4, to be one lower. Why ? Why do the faces need to have a monotonically increasing list of numeric names ?
The way FreeCAD does this is like having a C compiler that passes parameters to a function in a certain order but commits the called function to always expecting the parameters in the 9riginal order. I mean it must be the user's fault for not keeping track of the stack offsets of the various parameters, right
Either these face numbers are opaque, and we shouldn't be basing scripts of them, or they are transparent, and their naming is conserved across deletions and additions.
I knew the TNP was bad. I didn't know it was due to such an elementary design fault. It's like renumbering 100+ houses in a street just because one gets built or denolished, and just expecting the postman and ask your correspondents automatically know!
Hi Having been on the same freecad learning journey I two have had the same issues with sketching on plains, For me it manifested itself on sheet metal where I wasn’t able to sketch on a face created by the sheet metal bend function.
sooner have a downloadable piece of software with a few quirks than a cloud based package that needs 24/7 net acces to be useable or that they can pull at a whim.
I agree with what you say in the video 100%, and yeah this is a big big issue, and I could be wrong but I think the renaming of the faces should be a small fix hopefully not too far in the future.
Wow. I tried to teach myself FreeCAD when my educational license for Fusion ended. I came to the conclusion that FreeCAD was unusable (to me) because I simply had no idea this was an issue and didn't stumble upon it this knowledge early on. If I had known this was the reason at the start, I likely would have stuck with it. I'm going to give it another try. I had no doubt it was good quality software, I honestly thought I was just terrible at CAD. I'm a software engineer by trade and have no professional experience in CAD though I have familiarity with modelers.
Being only a couple of months into FreeCAD, I know this problem all too well... Despite using RealThunder's branch, I still end up creating a save file everytime I add a layer (sketch, pad, pocket, etc), because many-many-many times, I need to go back to one of those steps and start building up again because things break easily when I tweak something and half my model might suddenly no longer render... It's super frustrating, and I wish it weren't the case because I do quite like what it has to offer and I have perservered to make some really cool 3d-printed parts with it.
Thank you very much for making this video! I've been putting up with FreeCAD for a long time, just because it is free. I've often wished that the developers of Blender and KiCAD would take over the FreeCAD project.
KiCAD has a whole bunch of breaking bugs as well. And add to that a huge bucket of U.I. incostencies making each part of KiCAD hard to work with. Yes I use KiCAD primarily for my electronic projects.
The devs of KiCAD should work on their stuff before tackling another huge project.
why are people even using CAD formats for 3D? CAD was never good for 3D anything
@@FeelingShred LOL! Sure...
@@sysghost Kicad is much better than FreeCAD. Like on the scale of Gimp to Blender, Freecad is closer to Gimp and Kicad closer to blender. To be fair, recent Kicad has added so much good stuff, especially renamble power symbols.
@@FeelingShred ...What in the universe are you on about????
What i noticed about working around bugs in FreeCAD is the new way was a better way to go about the problem.
That is really not a software issue or a "bug" necessarily, it's a methodology problem. As you say, origin based is the correct method. This is true even for small parts because you want to do a part once, not redo over and over - stability is king. New users should learn this from the start. Much worse is the lack of truly flexible multi-body. If you want to do "quick intuitive" 3D then use Sketchup or 123D. Building geometry on the surfaces of other geometry is a road leading to disaster - at least professionally.
It's so sad that its now 0.21 and not only is this not fixed, but none of the other major problems with FreeCAD are fixed either. You still can't create multiple bodies/features from the same sketch, still no midpoint constraint, auto constraints still work terribly requiring a ton of busy work and the list goes on and on. It really feels like the priorities are just off or some stubbornness with acknowledging serious issues, instead opting to call everything a skill issue is really holding FreeCAD back.
I mean just look at how nicely every person talking about it has to be when criticizing it to quell to mega toxic community.
FreeCAD literally makes me ok with giving Autodesk money, and I hate that...... The fact its been 2 years since this video released and its still just as bad really doesnt give me hope itll ever not be bad.
The fact that over 2 years later, this is still a huge issue with the software. I'm in the middle of learning how to transition from Fusion to FreeCad, using FreeCad 0.21.2 and this is becoming a huge pain in the ass. I'm working on translating my Fusion designs over to FreeCad and everything just keeps breaking. I'd rather spend the $1500 or whatever it costs to buy Fusion rather than deal with these FreeCad headaches at this point.
Does any other CAD tool have this "problem"? By the way, it may be some kind of logical problem. But there are many such fundamental problems that software developers solve. That's what software is for, to solve problems. Why don't the FreeCAD developers fix this? Don't they want to deal with it? Or are there problems with the architecture of FreeCAD and you would have to rebuild large parts to fix the problem? I mean FreeCAd is being actively developed, there must be a reason why this problem is not prioritised.