I'm an engineer. I've been using Linux and open source software exclusively for 26 years. My entire engineering tool chain from design concept to CNC machining is open source. I've had to make some compromises and it hasn't always been easy, but it's *always* been worth it. FreeCAD is awesome. Huge appreciation to the FreeCAD dev team.
Do you use FreeCAD professionally or just for your hobby projects? Been using Fusion mostly and just can't justify using FreeCAD, as much as I want to like it. It's still not nearly as productive and robust as proprietary CAD-software, though the features are almost there for smaller projects. I often have to generate organic shapes and surfaces with high precision and control and I hate to say it, but FreeCAD still sucks for that.
@@Moronicsmurf - I admittedly cheat on CAM. Most of the parts I CNC machine are fairly simple and I prefer to write the G code manually for those. More complex parts such as hole patterns, I might use PyCAM. I've made some surprisingly complex parts, writing the G code manually, and I like having full control of the G code generation. When the G code is dialed in on a part, I can array it to make hundreds of little nylon parts on a 24"X48" sheet of plastic on a CNC router, or I can turn little titanium parts on a lathe. Most of our products are now 3D printed, so PrusaSlicer is the CAM.
@@iliketoast-q9b - I use FreeCAD professionally, in the sense that I use it for a business, but it's a very small business. I'm the only engineer, so most people would probably consider that as "mostly hobby", even though it's my business. Honestly, most people would still not consider FreeCAD to be ready for prime time. A friend owns a business with approximately 50 employees, most of them engineers. They use SolidWorks. FreeCAD does everything I need and more. It's been stable for the last couple of years. With the 1.0 release, I'm hopeful it'll get better much faster. It's been a long time coming but it feels like the development is past the knee in the curve and momentum is building quickly. I expect FreeCAD to be in a lot more businesses in a couple of years. The bonus of not needing a Windows machine is huge, in my opinion.
FreeCAD is great as a feature rich opensource CAD package, which is amazing because there aren't many free CAD software packages. But it has a workflow that feels very different from most CAD packages, what it really needs is number of interface and accessibility updates. Regardless, I'm amazed and very happy with how feature rich FreeCAD has become.
I just cannot get used to freecad's workflow. It's weird and kludgy. The whole workbench thing, the way the body/parts tree works, the odd renaming of things like extruding, etc etc. I am unable to gel with it to such an extreme degree that using solvespace for a while felt like a breath of fresh air after freecad ... i mean ... that's saying something lol.
@@detaart My tip is stay in the "part design" workbench for now. That one is most similar to other CAD programs workbench named similar to Solid/Parametric. Just have to get used to feature names like "pad" instead of extrude. Features can also only be applied on sketches containing manifold closed curves. Each "body" can only contain one manifold solid body.
Imagine if all the engineers, manufacturers and architects that pay for CAD licenses put 10% of that money to support open source CAD… I think we would have viable options in just a few years.
Can only hope, KiCAD already changed the playing field for EDA tools. Stuff like push-and-shove routers were sold as premium features for thousands of dollars in subscription fees 10 years ago. Then CERN developers added it to KiCAD for free.. It really changed the game for hobbyists and smaller companies.
Yeah it's we live in amazing times, back when I was a student a CAD program like FreeCAD in it's current state could cost around $100k for a standard license, one computer. That would be much more today with inflation. I think a standard license of Siemens NX cost around $50k today (due to competition). CAD has always been protected and I see my self as lucky to have had the chance to test most CAD programs during my student years. FreeCAD is extremely powerful, but just keep in mind that these type of programs are mainly made for engineers and for mass production. It's natural that it takes a while to grasp all concepts, and looking into any formal CAD education through open course ware is helpful. FreeCAD have some benefits I think most have overlooked too, when FreeCAD 1.0 launches it also becomes the best Neutral Format in existence (overtaking step). Considering how much construction geometry and data it can store. A format that can be opened and edited on any platform on any place, ISS or middle of the Ocean. It require no internet connection or subscriptions. Commercial CAD should be worried.
No it isn't, sorry. Blender has been used by professional artists for a while now and for some pretty big name projects too. FreeCAD is lightyears away from that. Engineers might use it for hobby projects, but I've yet to see even a single company use FreeCAD professionaly or anyone using FreeCAD for anything above ambitious hobby projects.
@@iliketoast-q9b FreeCAD 1.0 hasn't launcher yet, it's still a Release Candidate. I think we'll see commercial adoption as soon as a stable 1.0 is out, considering the tools in large is there already in version 0.21.2 Beta. The 0.21.2 was missing a common Assembly workbench. Not knowing if your Assembly models will break in future releases was quite the limitation. But 1.0 will now ship with an new Assembly workbench that can be tried out in 1.0 RC. I don't expect Sony will hop over from NX to FreeCAD but smaller companies and start-ups might just as well start with FreeCAD. Larger adoption will probably not happen before it's feasible to find engineers trained in FreeCAD. So Universities will need to teach it, just like you can find courses using Blender on many technical universities today.
The mad lads finally did it. In earlier versions it was so easy to get myself into a corner with lots of errors that I could never resolve. Being told to try the latest got old real quick. I'll give this version another try.
The topological naming problem merge is HUGE for FreeCAD. Also, in FreeCAD, since all your UI & UX interactions are recorded & printed as a Python script, it becomes very easy to create applets based on your GUI actions.
yes that's a super powerful feature in FreeCAD and it's only going to get stronger with AI. I managed to create a few useful macros from just watching the python console while I work and taking help from Chat GPT. So completely without prior Python or programming education (so if I can anyone can). If you add exterior surface modeling in Blender and export with the "export to iges" (exports NURBS) plug-in. You can pretty much do anything a commercial CAD package can. I had formal CAD education though so I never saw the TNP as a problem, it's good CAD praxis to sketch on datum planes and move the datum planes with features like "pad.length" for example. But it'll definitely be helpful for the tinkerers. I can see how its more intuitive for them to sketch on surfaces, though I still wouldn't recommend it.
@@Artificial_Incompetence_Bot yes but if you don’t know what the design should look like in the end, you’re more likely to run into it. For novice users, it would be a frustrating and confusing glitch to run into, especially since it impacts how you resequence transformations (like extrusions, etc). What do you mean by using datum planes? Do you mean like starting with construction lines, then adding plane objects, then leading towards a more advanced GD&T approach? Like before making many sketches? Not all curves have a great parameterization. This is one of the problems with NURBS surfaces, which are more like icing on cake. NURBS is so easy if you can use programming, but few other features can depend on their surface (if any)
NURBS uses B-Splines, so it’s an analytic method (i.e., it is very helpful when you need an approximate or “best” solution) “Bessie you best get your functions of the second kind up in hya”
Also, it is very likely that you’ll be told “NURBS can’t have holes!”, but alas it is truly thine CAD software which canst resolve the “Pants theorem” for thine-st requisite curves. In other words, NURBS on a surface with one hole can be split into two NURBS problems. NURBS for volumes with voids is another matter entirely - still possible, but it’s clearly someone else’s problem (not mine)
Open Source is a quality in itself. For 3D-printing and CNC-cutting, I tested FreeCAD for a while, but had to drop it, and go the Blender route. I'm very willing to test again :)
You using the CAD extensions? I've been getting into 3D printing so I should probably learn them both to some degree but I've been trying to decide what to mess with first
I used Blender for 3d printing some years ago because FreeCAD thwarted my attempts to get proficient with it, whereas I knew Blender since about 1999. But in recent years, I finally broke though and this recent 1.0 RC1 release is so polished that it is just fun to build stuff with it. Now I only to go Blender if it is something really organic that lends itself to low poly modeling plus modifiers.
@@wisnoskij there is a tool called CAD Sketcher (a blender extension), which is really good, or so i heard, you can do CAD really well in blender, but i don't know about comparing it with a specialized tool like FreeCAD, so only testing we will know for sure.
I have been thinking of getting into 3d modeling for printing. But not having a good solution to do it on my Linux machine basically made this a non-starter. I will begrudgingly use Windows on my work machine, but I refuse to have it installed on my own personal machines. So thanks FreeCAD for making it a viable option, and thanks Lunduke for letting me know about it!
It's still FreeCAD, so clunky to use and other CAD offerings are still way easier to get into and more productive once you're up to speed on CAD-modelling. Onshape can be used with Linux btw and it's free for hobbyists.
At work I'm sadly bind to some renowned proprietary software, but I'm eager and really looking forward to implement the FreeCad in my worklflow as much as I can, as I'm already doing from approximately version 0.19. Keep the good work FreeCad team!!!!!!
Have used latest weeklies and very exited about freecad hitting stable 1.0. Even if it doesn't hit as hard as the big design softwares, but it is really good option for us that can't use those, or doesn't want to.
Good to see, love your attitude! I had formal CAD education and I can tell you it's well worth learning FreeCAD, it's extremely powerful (it was way beyond my expectations). FreeCAD might be tricky to wrap your head around in the beginning but it'll force you to use good CAD practices. After you've learned FreeCAD you can easily migrate your skills to any another CAD package, or keep using it and even scale up to a small company if you want. I'd recommend to try stay in the "part design" workbench as much as possible to begin with. Recreating from 2D drawings make great exercises, see if you can find some that contains information of the part volume so you can compare your results. And get a cheap 3D printer! Nothing more rewarding than actually being able to hold your creations!
@@Artificial_Incompetence_Bot thanks for the encouragement!! I have Ender 3 S1 Pro and I've already designed and printed a headphone hook for my cubical at work ❤️ i got to use a few considerations I hqve from 3d printing. What a rewarding experience indeed!
I learned Freecad. Then when I went to export my project I learned Freecad can't export in standard inches. When you use Freecad it'll act like you're using inches but it can't output in inches. So that makes Freecad useless to me. From what I understand it is a fundamental shortcoming with the basic framework of the program and is completely unfixable without abandoning everything and starting over. The lead dev has always been completely against supporting Standard since day one. So he likely did it intentionally. Never trust a kraut.
@@1pcfred In this part of the world we use metric, so I guess the software is designed around it. I never use those inches (apart from maybe monitor sizes), so I did not had the problems you had. Are you sure you did nor looked over some settings?
@@jclosed2516 yeah I'm sure it doesn't work. I'm fairly confident it'll never work too. The lack of support is intentional on the part of the developers. They don't want it to work. So they designed the software so it'll never support Standard. It's a spite move and I can appreciate that.
While it's not fully released just yet (you still need to use the weekly builds) it's fixed a lot of stuff. Topo naming problem fixed or at least massively better, construction lines are now dotted lines, automatic removal of redundant constraints, the dimensioning tool is now automatic like solidworks, simulation for CAM (at least in 3 axis, but not 4 just yet), CAM with 3d Surface support (slow but works needs an experimental flag setting), CAM for 4th rotary axis (same as surface). Haven't tested assembly3 with it yet (which is the solidworks type of assemblies) but that will hopefully be fixed in relation to the topo naming. Has a really good solidworks easy to use feel to it.
@@rainmannoodles I'm guessing there are situations where it can occur, but so far I've not been able to trigger it myself (before I could quite easily). I would also say another one thats probably overlooked is the auto removal of redundant constraints with a complicated sketch which helps a lot to avoid over constrained sketches
This is something I love to see, when I was still in university (mechanical engineering) I had a friend that didn’t wanted to use Windows no matter what, he used Octave instead of MatLab with no problem, but when it came to 3D CAD, he has to work like ten times harder than everyone else to make it work on FreeCAD. Since then it has been getting better and better.
Good! I'm formally trained in Simens NX and PTC Creo and definitely think it's worth learning FreeCAD. Tested it for 3 months now, wasn't hard to migrate from previous CAD knowledge. I'm amazed how strong it is and completely free, even for commercial use. Require no internet connection and works with every platform. It's the best time to get in on FreeCAD. Considering how many small companies and start ups will use this in the future. My advice is start with "Part Design" workbench and use it as far as you can. Classic CAD exercises is to recreate a 3D part from a 2D drawing and match the volume. If you want to build unbreakable parts I suggest you look into MIT Open Course Ware. Or there might also be youtubers who teaches you to use datum planes and expressions. When you feel like you master the Part Design-workbench you can move into Assembly-workbench (advanced CAD). In assembly you combine multiple parts into a bigger assembly with joints. Here the challenge is to pick the correct assembly constraints, the concept is similar to sketch constraints, but now we have movement in 6 degrees of freedom, 3 rotation and 3 translation. Your goal is to lock all except the one you want to move. There are tables of all constraints that show how any degrees of freedom each constraint locks, useful for beginners. Hope it helps, Good luck!
Had some time to test 1.0 RC, it's way better than I expected. You now have the ability to create one large sketch containing all the features you need and the apply features on selected closed lines exclusively. Gone are the days for Master/Slave sketches for every individual feature. This keeps the construction history clean. This workflow is more like NX and other big CAD package. Coming from NX I really like the improvements and changes to the workflow.
Graduated mechanical engineering and now I lost all my CAD licenses. So I just happened to have switched to freecad last week! I got my start in catia V5, and honestly it's not so different. What I love is the extremely feature rich plugin and optional workbench ecosystem. I just wish those were a little more user friendly, but it makes sense because their super expert-focused
@@iliketoast-q9b probably because all those "solutions" come with drawbacks. Fusion started as great free software for "small" users, but gets restriction after restriction. It also does not work without logging in, and the amount of work you can have is restricted, and don't get me started on cloud save only. Other software (like Onshape) has the same problem. No internet connection, no work. My work has been (I am retired now) electronic design and repair. I often come across weird shaped contraptions in apparatus than are broken and need to be replaced. Often those parts are not available any more, so I have to re-design them and print them on a 3D printer. FreeCAD is very capable of doing just these things. Yes - It has a learning curve, but I could use it after half a day, and was printing my first objects a few hours later. I have used it ever since...
One other effect of a viable Linux CAD program, one that starts getting a notable adoption, might convince companies like AutoCAD that Linux is a viable platform for them to support.
Has Adobe ported Photoshop, Illustratior, and Premiere because GIMP, Inkscape, and Kdenlive exist? Nope. What makes you think that Autodesk will be any different? Also, FreeCAD has been out for a very long time: the last stable is 0.21.2. That you can make a CAD work on platforms other than Windows was a point that has been proven for a very long time.
Maya is the only adobe product worth using any more and given their terrible practices I would choose Free CAD over AutoCAD if I needed it and it was at all possible. But in general adobe is a decayed mess of outdated and scammy products at this point.
We had Pro/ENGINEER on Linux a long time ago (I believe that it was ported from IRIX or HP-UX). I believe that it was the first and most powerful CAD we had on Linux. Sadly, its last Linux release was in 2004 or 2005.
I'm in the "want to use Linux for a daily driver but need CAD for work" group, so this is amazing news. I tried FreeCAD a while back and it was unfortunately unusable at the time. Here's hoping that's changed
I work at a makerspace where the entire lab is based on open-source. All the computers are linux, and FreeCAD is used for design/production for Laser, 3D Print, and CNC mill. We teach courses that are about 18 hours (over six weeks). I recently tried out the RC1 version with a group of students, and it mostly went well. The one major problem we hit is the "overlay" option in the UI. I recommend disabling that in the preferences immediately. Students were losing track of panels, getting extremely frustrated. It is a feature intended to make the Model and Task panels hide away when not in use, but it just does not work well. Other than that - pretty smooth sailing!
Freecad doesn't actually support Standard even if it looks like it does while you're using it. Freecad can't export in Standard units. When you try the scale of your project will be completely off. Which seems like an easy enough fix to me. But from what I've heard the internal engine of Freecad is such a mess it isn't. It is fundamentally flawed.
@@rezah336 standard is short for the international industrial standard inch. Which is often confused with Imperial but that's because people are ignorant. ignorant adjective 1. lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated Example: he was told constantly that he was ignorant and stupid Now I hope that's no one you know.
@@rezah336 right, You don't use standard so the problem wouldn't crop up for you. Freecad handles everything internally in metric. The lead developer of the program was never interested in supporting standard so he never designed the software so it could ever support standard in any meaningful way. Switching the units freecad can appear to support standard but it just can't export anything in standard units. At least that's been my experience. I haven't tried freecad in a number of years now but I don't suspect anything's changed. The lead devs just are not interested in supporting standard units. If I was a cynical type I'd say the lack of support is malicious intent on their part. Being as I have had the displeasure of interacting with one of them in the past.
We ran Apollo workstations in our engineering faculty for five years. Their "Unix" environments, both BSD and SysV, were emulated on top of the native DomainOS, which btw was written in Objective Pascal. The Unix emulation had major shortcomings and unresolvable bugs. The CAD software we used ran under DomainOS. For us the Unix emulations were unusable for anything other than simple single-user/single-task applications.
Object Pascal, no "ive". I've asked myself for years why that's the name, considering Objective-C had a more sensical name, but whatever, it's still a great language anyway.
I spent a few days learning FreeCAD/Ondsel ES... it's very worthy software. I'm wayy- faster in Blender, but if I wanna loft a boat hull now, I'll use Ondsel because it makes the process easy and fast as compared to the Blender way of doing things.
haha :) it can already compete with SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Onshape, Fusion 360, Inventor, PTC Creo. I was laughing because that form of CAD you mentioned is considered far more primitive in the CAD world. It only comes down to the building sector being more conservative in its production methods. So they simply don't have the need for this type of advanced CAD programs. With that said I'm pretty sure It should be surpassing mentioned CAD in short if it hasn't already. I'd look into the BIM workbench if I was you, and remember you can turn on the Python console in FreeCAD, that will give you the Python for every mouse click. Driving modeling with Python is rapidly becoming a stronger tool with today's advanced language models like chat GPT. Even for us non programmers. If you only need 2D drawings there's also another free open source CAD project named LibreCAD, it's more like AutoCAD.
AutoCAD released Fusion 360 for free to hamstring open source development work. It worked too. Fusion is just good enough to quell momentum in open source development. It was a brilliant strategic move on their part.
@@1pcfred I dropped Fusion for FreeCAD, because I hate to be restricted, being forced to be always-on-line and having a mandatory account and subscription. And lately they also restrict what you can and cannot do. I don't like that. But hey - Everyone his or hers choice...
Jokes on you, I've been using FreeCAD for a while now for my home projects, like a loft bed, a trailer enclosure (basically my tool garage) and a secure (anti porch pirates) parcel box.
Been using freecad for a while now. It's becoming a pretty robust as a cad cam workflow at this point, by .19 I found I was actually trusting the gcode it was producing. I wish it would focus a bit more on lathe specific gcode as it's really way more set up to do milling work. But it is possible to produce lathe tool paths if your creative enough lol aside from that it's by far better than the early say 2000-2003 pro engineer or solid works, actually is more capable of either of those as of now. Aside from organic modeling which there is blender for, it's a darn good thing.
I learned NX/unigraphics back in early 2000 it ran on the Solaris platform back then haha. It wasn't nearly as strong as FreeCAD is now, back then fillet/rounds was nice on paper but always crashed in practice. Have you noticed that you can export your quad models from Blender using the "export to iges" plug-in in Blender. Import it as either NURBS surfaces or solids and continue work on them in FreeCAD?
This should be the most necessary improving for linux/mac world! Better graphic support, GPU use, professional CAD is the most necessary thing. Congratulations FreeCAD team!
When I met you at the start of all the insanity in lockdowns at a BWW, we discussed AutoCADs use of "AutoLISP" and "VisuaLISP" which is a VBA integration into AutoCAD. I can tell you that in the past 3 years, the entire industry is looking to dump AutoDesk in very much the way people are dumping Adobe right now. Edit: I tried it. I can tell you that this may one day be able to replace AutoCAD, but 1.0 ain't it chief. It's so far away from it, that I may make by first video ever just to explain why.
Do it! There's so many ways to help out the project and doing a breakdown of the solutions limitations would at this point probably be even more useful than minor PRs on the code base.
Nobody is going to really challenge Autodesk anytime soon, but FreeCAD 1.0 is a big step... you can now legitimately make the case to use only FreeCAD for professional design work, though such conviction will be rewarded with additional work! Hard to say how valuable software freedom is worth, to me, it's worth more then the headaches of putting up ~somewhat~ inferior software.
@@JohnnyThund3r I hate using the term, but I am a professional AutoCAD user. I have used SketchUp professionally. I have screwed around in REVIT. I have programmed solutions in both AutoLISP and VisualLISP. I have modeled in probably half a dozen programs. Unless there is some skin, plugin, or mod of this software that significantly modifies it, I would classify this software as barely usable. No, I am not joking.
@@JohnnyThund3r That's the weird part. The foundations needed to challenge AutoCAD and Revit are there in a lot of programs, but they don't because of X or Y or just simply making a decision with their design. Every CAD program is iterative, too. AutoCAD is, iirc, using the Maya engine. It's a choice to not challenge them.
FreeCAD is awesome. Before 1.0 it had really rough edges in the UI so only determined nerds used it much. 1.0 is a quantum leap forward in usability, I love it!
This is my experience too. The last couple of months of development are incredible. Or, more likely, the last couple of months of these long-running features finished, are incredible.
Actually, the new version of Ubuntu will probably be a larger hindrance to people using Linux. I tried Ubuntu for ~1 month, ~1 month ago, it was a train wreck. For a basic, entry-level Linux distro, it was broken, glitchy, and dropped ever ball it could have dropped. Fedora, my normal distro, is far more usable, friendly, stable, and welcoming. Thinking back to old Ubuntu releases, they were a thing of beauty for anyone wanting to check out Linux, but now? I honestly couldn't recommend any Ubuntu Desktop version.
I definitely agree. Ubuntu was my starter and I absolutely loved it. Last few years I've tried giving it another shot and I can't stand Snaps. Constantly bugging about restarting apps, random weird bugs among other things. Maybe PopOS will be the spiritual successor to Ubuntu from its golden years
I had this same issue over a decade ago... Canonical is just weird, Masters of disaster... Can never recommend default Ubuntu after they installed Unity on me. Damn it! I just want Gnome 2 back!
@@octomancerHonestly I loved Unity, my biggest qualm was having to install a tweak tool to do basic customizations. I could even see myself using it today if it were well-supported
Cant wait top try it out. Previously I attempted to use FreeCAD but it was horrendously buggy, also user interface was ... hard to use. I hope for great improvement in both areas.
The user interface was still horrendous as of 2 weeks ago unfortunately. The glitches were annoying but not as bad as I had heard so I think they have made progress on that. I really hope they redesign the user interface eventually, I would love for it to be a viable alternative to Fusion 360 & the like.
@@Marty234 The workbenches are developed by different teams, so there might be a slight lack of naming/user interface convention. But let me explain a method I think you will have more success with, imagine that "part-design" is your main workbench. It's probably called Solids/Parametric in other CAD programs, and "part"-workbench is more for deep level geometry work like stitching surfaces together into solids, and fixing bad geometry (often called Surface in other packages). If you want to create unbreakable parametric models, name your dimensional constraints and then link to them using expressions (the "e" in the parameter field") Example: instead of entering a number in your dimensional length you can enter "=" followed by "Sketch001.Constraints.YourDimensionsName". Sketch on Datum-planes instead of surfaces, and move them in place by linking their translation in an axis, again as an expression "=" and "Pad.Length".
This is an improvement but sorry a python based program is NOT fast enough. just the other day i tried to build something slightly more complex and the UI was taking 5mins to respond, this is not acceptable performance.
FreeCAD 1.0 is a great milestone, but it's still far from viability in a professional setting. How do I know? CAD software is one thing keeping me from going Linux only, and I use just use Rhinoceros as a freelancing side job, not even an actual parametric CAD or my actual job. Imho, GIMP 3.0, which we're going to hear about in the next few weeks, a couple months in the absolute worst case, is going to be the bigger release of the two: it's far closer to viability, and one of its professional niches are youtubers, and that's going to translate in more of them trying Linux sticking to it, thus better advertising.
@@emperorpalpatine6080 Multiple pieces in a single sketch is sure one. But even more than missing features, FreeCAD makes GIMP look like a UX/UI masterpiece, and everyone says GIMP's UI is terrible (which it's actually not, except for a few things, GIMP is really just missing basic features): the various editing modes are hidden behind an anassuming dropdown menu, every time you try to do something the log drawns you in error massages that mean something to you only if you made the program, and really everything is clunky and unintuitive. There's also that DWG support is a must if you're cooperating with others, since everyone uses AutoCAD, and FreeCAD only does it via external programs (LibreDWG and Oda File Converter), and neither of them is good.
@@emperorpalpatine6080 in freecad, 1.0 solves one of its biggest problems, but its still and will always be a really slow program because its python based. the other day i needed to make a 3d model of a QFN-80 package, nothing hard, quite simple stuff, the sketch at a point was taking 5 mins to respond to inputs, it took me hours to sketch the part because of this, hopefully i dont have to explain that this isn't acceptable performance
@@cj09beira the Python calls a feature programmed in C++. So you can turn on the Python Console in FreeCAD to see what Python command will call upon the feature you used, that way you can easily create your own macros using Python. I'm no programmer so don't quote me on how this works but it's pretty common in CAD to use Python as a console language. Did you check if you ran out of RAM? Do you have previous CAD knowledge? It's normal that it takes time to update the geometry ones you exit the sketch, but did changes inside the sketch take 5 min? Seem's like a rather big sketch for a CAD program that only does features on a singe manifold sketch...? I'm curious because I haven't run into this yet, but I never had a problem with the Topological Naming Problem either, because I use Datum planes and expressions.
Very interesting video. I know nothing about CAD, photo editing or video editing software (apart from what the software is being used for, obviously) but I still watch videos of experts using applications like _Affinity_ or _Da Vinci,_ and comparing them to their Windows equivalent ... simply because each sophisticated application offering a real alternative to Windows-only software is another step towards the goal of making Linux as a whole better for everybody.
I tried it out before 1.0 and the source code was really easy to modify to my ends to make it work how I wanted... the way the code was set up was ingenious to make a complex interactive object operation so simple to implement. I was thrilled about it! Addons just a python script so easy to read modify and debug!
Looking forward to the 1.0 release. I use 0.21 at the moment for all my odds and sods 3d printer designs, despite its foibles. The thing which I appreciate the most about it is that it is not at all cloud based. All your files are yours, on your Personal Computer PC and thus you can never be held to ransom.
I've been using the release candidate 1.0, honestly sometimes it gets frustrating, but damn the absolute potential of FreeCAD is leaps ahead of other badly priced closed source software solution, we can have something really special here.
what about the people in the hobbies space?? I use freecad to model all my 3D pieces. It's a hate and love history. I hope that with this release, the things improve ;)
I do CAD and machine work somewhat regularly, a friend of mine who's also a fairly hardcore linux user tried turning me onto FreeCAD, its a joke to call it CAD software - but nonetheless I appreciate the effort and I dream that one day it'll replace my windows VM running SOLIDWORKS.
@@rezah336 It's a parametric design suite that cannot handle upstream parameter updates without breaking your entire working model. Exporting is also broken, or at least has been prior to 1.0 (I'll see how that works when I eventually update it), it's a coin flip whether your carefully constrained arch segments will invert themselves. Naturally, as a long-time Linux user, I love it, and wouldn't trade it for anything else.
@@Cris-bj7ee I don't want to be to hard on you guys, I think FreeCAD should be used by hobbyist as well as professionals. But if your models crash its not because of FreeCAD, the topological naming problem was never a problem for engineers. I don't care if I'm using a $100k Simens NX license I still wouldn't sketch on surfaces. My advice is sketch instead on Datum-planes and move them in place by driving their placement by an "expression" that links to your feature, like "Pad.Length" or "Sketch.Constraints.Width" for example.
@@rezah336 There's nothing wrong with it, I come from mainly NX, Pro-E or now PTC Creo and tested most other CAD packages during my student years. It's a very solid CAD package, no pun intended, reminds more of PTC Creo than NX. But as of now its far from as intuitive as other CAD packages, stems from its development form. But you can Create just as good and unbreakable models in FreeCAD as you can in NX today. The only thing FreeCAD is currently lacking in is some surface modelling features. Class A modeling for the car industry would be challenging, but that's true for most commercial CAD packages as well. As of now I don't think there's any model you couldn't build in FreeCAD that you could in Fusion 360, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Inventor at least (this has long been true). Advanced surface models would better be subdivision modeled in Blender and exported as NURBS via "export to iges" or similar plugins. To later be stitched into solids in FreeCAD though. FreeCAD lacks own subdivision modeling, however such task are still more suited for programs like Blender/Maya/Cinema4d/3DSMAX. Class A surface models are more suited for Rhino/Alias/NX/Catia.
@@Artificial_Incompetence_Bot datum planes aren't necessary for this. They only make sense of using multiple sketches attached to a single plane. Otherwise sketches can be manipulated the same way as a datum so why add redundant dependency?
I've been using FreeCad on my Windows machine for last 2 years, making small parts to feed my 3d printing curiosity. Most other options are cloud-locked and with a hefty price tag.Freecad had it's problems. But it worked, didn't ask whether i'm from the polite half of the planet, and didn't have an issue with me selling the prints/drawings.
freecad is complete nerd oriented, the work flow is unintuitive and is painful. I personally hate freecad, it's a time waster. I want to be productive when CADing. a lot of people have 3D printers, they need a good free CAD software, but freecad is not it. However I will take a look at it again and hopefully it's much more stable and doesn't keep crashing or give confusing errors. UPDATE: I gave FreeCAD another go after maybe 2 years? it's gotten better and doesn't crash every few operations. I actually going to switch over to using it more. TIP start off in "Part Design" workbench, it will make your life a lot easier to design.
I'm sorry you find it too taxing to learn, but I do understand. CAD programs are great for engineers if you want to take one of your designs into mass production. But every tinker might not start out with those needs, I think it might be more suiting and rewarding for you to learn another type of program more used in the Prototyping stage, for Product designers. I would recommend Blender, it's also free and open source. You can use a technique called subdivision modeling in it. Subtract and add shapes and carve out your creation, it's preferred by artists and product designers. It will also take a while to learn, but it can create 3D shapes very fast, more like 3D sketching.
@@Artificial_Incompetence_Bot I understand how CAD works. I was using DesignSpark for a while and then switched over to using OnShape. Blender is not suited for CAD but many use it for that, I find blender to be pailful to use. I did take another look at FreeCAD and I have to say I am very pleased with it. It's not crashing or spitting confusing errors like it use to. I took some time to re-learn the basics of FreeCad and I can see myself using it more and more. It still have its ugly warts and quirks, but it's improved quite a bit since I last gave it a try, maybe 2 years back. Thanks for your input. I'm going to switch to using FreeCAD, so I can keep my design on my own PC.
My CNC machine sits and gathers dust today because Freecad can't export anything in inches. While you're working with Freecad it can appear to be using inches but it is not. At least that's how it was when I used it. The lead dev of Freecad has zero interest in ever fixing that and the contributors I don't think are in any position to fix it either.
The movie industry switched from IRIX to Linux when sgi folded and is still running Linux to this day, the CAD sector was undecided. Some switched to Windows, some to Linux, and so a bunch of professional applications were available (usually the very expensive, very high-end stuff like pro/E Wildfire), but over time, pretty much the entire industry slowly switched to Windows. The software vendors dropped Linux support completely, or in some cases only offer Linux versions to large customers on request. My guess is that VFX companies had significant internal development resources with a UNIX background, and their in-house software was written for IRIX, so switching to Linux was just easier. The engineering companies ran UNIX because PCs simply weren't powerful enough, they didn't actually care about the operating system.
I love FreeCAD, and I honestly use it for every kind of modelling I have to do. What it can't do, OpenSCAD does. Interestingly enough, that Unix-like workflow that pushes people away from it, makes it at least 3x faster to use than something like Fusion360. And in recent releases, the GUI even feeds you a workflow.
@@Pulsar2000 Like I said, I use FreeCAD for everything, and OpenSCAD for those wizard moments when there's no tool in FreeCAD that works Maybe a complex geometry is making it blow up, maybe I have some complex surface snapping that I can't model in any other way and it's making FreeCAD wig out Excessive complexity breaks the logic of FreeCAD, and complex objects made from dozens of simple objects are difficult to work with in a digital 3D space The scrip based modelling of OpenSCAD solves these problems FreeCAD runs into, at the expense of re-introducing the problems that FreeCAD solves So really, they're mutually exclusive use-cases
I work for a big electrical contractor and all their desktops and labtops use windows software. The construction trades need to go open source, plus will save them money.
Not possible until we remove the corruption in Western governments. Look at Germany's "attempts" to use Open Source and see how Microsoft "solves" legal issues.
Hmm, maybe I should have another look. In my opinion, one of the areas where Linux/open source was really weak so far is 3D mechanical CAD. I have KiCAD for electronic design and several solutions for 2D drawings. But 3D CAD with FreeCAD had been a PITA, so I gave up on that. I hope it's better now.
CAD is the biggest weakness of Linux at the moment, well together with audio (default volume at 100% is a big problem). It is one of the big reasons why people are forced to use Windows. So it is great when FreeCAD improves.
I use libreCAD frequently, but not for mech engineering of complete components. The 2D classic-autocad format is really good for solving and visualizing moderately complex geometry problems, and even for really basic stuff like laying out a garden and measuring surface areas or even what angle do I cut this 2×4 that needs to be tangent to this other widget in the chicken coop. Like electronic graph paper with automated calipers, compass, and protractor.
This is good for Engineering & Architectural companies. If the user interface has had significant improvements and has features for 3D printing etc it could also be good for the hobbyist and "Home Engineers". The user interface was un-intuitive, so I have been hoping for improvements there. I will be giving the RC 1 a spin as soon as I can.
I've been trying FreeCAD about once per year for a while. It always comes off as a case study in committee design and volunteer construction. The horrible workflows and user interface are subjective, and I confess I'm a novice, but what's not subjective are the straight-up malfunctions which inevitably arise after an hour or two of usage. And every time, I'm assured that FreeCAD is now "The best it's ever been!" Anyway, I'm sure I'll try it again when the next opportunity arises. Maybe this time is different.
Free cad is great. Some say the workflow is weird and clunky, but it was the first GUI cad program i used. I didn't have much trouble learning it with nothing to compare it to other than OpenSCAD. I actually had more trouble learning fusion 360 because i was used to free cad. I still prefer OpenSCAD and now CADQuery(but i hate python) over gui cad programs.
Most people just don't understand the workflow because they never learnt CATIA. If you know CATIA, its the exact same workflow, just with a drop-down workbench selector instead of a workbench menu.
I used to know someone who worked in drainage planning, in the mid 2010's they where still booting DOS for one app. The upgrade cost was 80K for a single user, if it works why change. For something like freeCAD it may take years, if they can get students/UNI's to convert to the app a generation of people will jump over.
That's awesome news! I'll try to deploy to some architects just to see how it'd work. Even for basic viewing it'd be awesome it would work. I was often asked about some ifc viewer. maybe freecad would be great for that.
Brics has been a LONG TIME Linux supported release. Compare Brics to AutoDesk, not FreeCAD to AutoCAD. As someone who lives in CAD applications, it's not fair to expect FreeCAD to compete. However, it's pretty freaking good for what it is. Heck, QCAD is pretty amazing too, and KiCAD kicks major butt for its userbase. We took out 3DSMax, now we need to take out AutoDesk and Adobe.
Unfortunatly it will probably appeal only beginner as you said expert Cad engineer will complain that it took longer to make the same thing. I will test it as soon as I can.
No, but what Ubuntu will do is with the next release make it a 1 click install to get FreeCAD and all the other programs we need. I've been running Debian for decades, often just doing upgrades in place without breaking things. A huge deal, it might seem boring, but boring is good !
It's always good to have options, but I'd say that if you're using FreeCAD instead of Blender to design 3D printing parts, you might want to consider a change.
The learning curve with Freecad is steep, but still no worse than Solidworks was. Im glad I took the time to learn Freecad when I did, because now the "features" will be on the way! Congratulations to those at Freecad for the release of v 1.0!
The way I have always seen the situation is the CADD software dictates the OS, the OS doesn't dictate the CADD software. If Autodesk switched development to Linux or MacOS then every autocad user would switch their OS without hesitation. (Same for CATIA, Solidworks, etc; the whole workshop will be molded around the CADD software.)
wait until you take your designs in f360 and convert them to freecad to make this statement :) . I don't have too many, but certainly is a hard puzzle sometimes. I'm not even talking about finding bugs in the original designs.
@mgord9518 ya I have to buy a 2nd GPU to do GPU pass through, it's also not a simple thing to do. Just running a normal VM gets horrible performance out of F360 (and pretty much everything else : )
Linux accounting software has been around for more than a decade, GnuCash was certified by the tax authority in Britain in 2006 and exports to Quicken/QuickBooks if that's what your accountant needs. Or, you can just print out the tax forms you need and run queries in GnuCash to fill in the blanks. That it isn't some kind of certified global standard doesn't change the fact that it has been doing _the accounting books_ correctly for nearly twenty years, and _accounting methods_ *do* have to meet a certified global standard!
Looks like I'll need to give it a try next time I want to make 3D model to print.. Tried FreeCAD half a year ago and after hours of being stuck on weird underconstrained / overconstrained errors I gave up, opened onshape and within half an hour I had the model I wanted (I followed exactly the same steps as I did in FreeCAD but it just worked). I'll happily leave onshape because their license is meh.. but it's only thing I can use (everything else is too expensive for how much I would use it, not to mention linux support)
I keep 2 operating systems (win+linux) just for this reason. Although FreeCAD is good but still there are other options which are better and more acceptable widely.
Surprised that old Apollo workstations are the example to contrast to (reasonable, though, if that was your working experience). In Windows, MicroStation or AutoCAD are very popular, and my first question for FreeCAD would be... can it be scripted? (which is a prominent feature in MicroStation or AutoCAD). Glad to see that FreeCAD runs an embedded Python interpreter.
Excited to see freecad go 1.0, but this is not new software and has been available and progressing for quite some time. I’m not quite sure why the presentation here assumes (pretends?) like this hasn’t been available for years.
Hahah i have been using all my windows VST plugins on Linux for 8 years now, it's certainly possible to install digital audio software on linux, even if it's windows software
@@toby2581 I had just bought a magazine with the installation disk to start with Linux two weeks before. I found out what was causing the problems, learned about what I would need to do to fix it, and my boss let me print out the entire kernel man file on a printer at work. I used that to figure out what options I needed to set, and how. Refusing to use your brain is a _you_ problem!
I'm an engineer. I've been using Linux and open source software exclusively for 26 years. My entire engineering tool chain from design concept to CNC machining is open source. I've had to make some compromises and it hasn't always been easy, but it's *always* been worth it. FreeCAD is awesome. Huge appreciation to the FreeCAD dev team.
Do you use FreeCAD professionally or just for your hobby projects? Been using Fusion mostly and just can't justify using FreeCAD, as much as I want to like it. It's still not nearly as productive and robust as proprietary CAD-software, though the features are almost there for smaller projects. I often have to generate organic shapes and surfaces with high precision and control and I hate to say it, but FreeCAD still sucks for that.
What do you run for CAM??
@@Moronicsmurf - I admittedly cheat on CAM. Most of the parts I CNC machine are fairly simple and I prefer to write the G code manually for those. More complex parts such as hole patterns, I might use PyCAM. I've made some surprisingly complex parts, writing the G code manually, and I like having full control of the G code generation. When the G code is dialed in on a part, I can array it to make hundreds of little nylon parts on a 24"X48" sheet of plastic on a CNC router, or I can turn little titanium parts on a lathe.
Most of our products are now 3D printed, so PrusaSlicer is the CAM.
@@iliketoast-q9b - I use FreeCAD professionally, in the sense that I use it for a business, but it's a very small business. I'm the only engineer, so most people would probably consider that as "mostly hobby", even though it's my business.
Honestly, most people would still not consider FreeCAD to be ready for prime time. A friend owns a business with approximately 50 employees, most of them engineers. They use SolidWorks. FreeCAD does everything I need and more. It's been stable for the last couple of years. With the 1.0 release, I'm hopeful it'll get better much faster. It's been a long time coming but it feels like the development is past the knee in the curve and momentum is building quickly. I expect FreeCAD to be in a lot more businesses in a couple of years. The bonus of not needing a Windows machine is huge, in my opinion.
@@Liberty4Ever ah i had my suspicion, no shade.. its why i still use fusion for my mills and lathes. :/ (dont wanna)
FreeCAD is great as a feature rich opensource CAD package, which is amazing because there aren't many free CAD software packages.
But it has a workflow that feels very different from most CAD packages, what it really needs is number of interface and accessibility updates. Regardless, I'm amazed and very happy with how feature rich FreeCAD has become.
I just cannot get used to freecad's workflow. It's weird and kludgy. The whole workbench thing, the way the body/parts tree works, the odd renaming of things like extruding, etc etc.
I am unable to gel with it to such an extreme degree that using solvespace for a while felt like a breath of fresh air after freecad ... i mean ... that's saying something lol.
@@detaart My tip is stay in the "part design" workbench for now. That one is most similar to other CAD programs workbench named similar to Solid/Parametric. Just have to get used to feature names like "pad" instead of extrude. Features can also only be applied on sketches containing manifold closed curves. Each "body" can only contain one manifold solid body.
So basically early blender situation?
I hope it's blender situation, not gimp situation though xD
Yea. Its UI is literally unusable, and it has some overall extremely annoying "quirks" that will have to be removed before FC can become mainstream.
there's ondsel, it's basically a UI wrapper around FreeCAD
Imagine if all the engineers, manufacturers and architects that pay for CAD licenses put 10% of that money to support open source CAD… I think we would have viable options in just a few years.
If every college/university gave the book-fees of just one of their engineering/design students to open source it would fund everything.
So true.
Can only hope, KiCAD already changed the playing field for EDA tools. Stuff like push-and-shove routers were sold as premium features for thousands of dollars in subscription fees 10 years ago. Then CERN developers added it to KiCAD for free.. It really changed the game for hobbyists and smaller companies.
I literally just used that to mod a PCB and change the end connector. It's kinda wild that it's free.
Yeah it's we live in amazing times, back when I was a student a CAD program like FreeCAD in it's current state could cost around $100k for a standard license, one computer. That would be much more today with inflation. I think a standard license of Siemens NX cost around $50k today (due to competition). CAD has always been protected and I see my self as lucky to have had the chance to test most CAD programs during my student years. FreeCAD is extremely powerful, but just keep in mind that these type of programs are mainly made for engineers and for mass production. It's natural that it takes a while to grasp all concepts, and looking into any formal CAD education through open course ware is helpful. FreeCAD have some benefits I think most have overlooked too, when FreeCAD 1.0 launches it also becomes the best Neutral Format in existence (overtaking step). Considering how much construction geometry and data it can store. A format that can be opened and edited on any platform on any place, ISS or middle of the Ocean. It require no internet connection or subscriptions. Commercial CAD should be worried.
Absolutely correct - this is a huge deal. This is now as respectable for the engineering field as Blender has been for the artistic field. .
I absolutely agree. Fingers crossed.
Totally agree! Great time to be alive!
No it isn't, sorry. Blender has been used by professional artists for a while now and for some pretty big name projects too. FreeCAD is lightyears away from that. Engineers might use it for hobby projects, but I've yet to see even a single company use FreeCAD professionaly or anyone using FreeCAD for anything above ambitious hobby projects.
@@iliketoast-q9b Yes, upon further reflection... FreeCAD is only at the beginnning of its rise. Blender was there 20 years ago.
@@iliketoast-q9b FreeCAD 1.0 hasn't launcher yet, it's still a Release Candidate. I think we'll see commercial adoption as soon as a stable 1.0 is out, considering the tools in large is there already in version 0.21.2 Beta. The 0.21.2 was missing a common Assembly workbench. Not knowing if your Assembly models will break in future releases was quite the limitation. But 1.0 will now ship with an new Assembly workbench that can be tried out in 1.0 RC. I don't expect Sony will hop over from NX to FreeCAD but smaller companies and start-ups might just as well start with FreeCAD. Larger adoption will probably not happen before it's feasible to find engineers trained in FreeCAD. So Universities will need to teach it, just like you can find courses using Blender on many technical universities today.
The mad lads finally did it. In earlier versions it was so easy to get myself into a corner with lots of errors that I could never resolve. Being told to try the latest got old real quick.
I'll give this version another try.
Let us know (after a week maybe) how do you find it. Thanks
Arch Linux had 8 patches for this before the 1.0rc1 release. Crazy.
At this moment several non-profits, NGOs and reddit groups are getting ready to assume control of the project
if people allow themselves to be infiltrated then it is their own fault, the tactic is open
Probably competitor companies trying to ruin the free project
First step a Code of Conduct and a Community Guidelines. And moderators. What else. Oh a steering committee! 😅
Fork it
Oops!
In before George Soros take over!
The topological naming problem merge is HUGE for FreeCAD.
Also, in FreeCAD, since all your UI & UX interactions are recorded & printed as a Python script, it becomes very easy to create applets based on your GUI actions.
yes that's a super powerful feature in FreeCAD and it's only going to get stronger with AI. I managed to create a few useful macros from just watching the python console while I work and taking help from Chat GPT. So completely without prior Python or programming education (so if I can anyone can). If you add exterior surface modeling in Blender and export with the "export to iges" (exports NURBS) plug-in. You can pretty much do anything a commercial CAD package can. I had formal CAD education though so I never saw the TNP as a problem, it's good CAD praxis to sketch on datum planes and move the datum planes with features like "pad.length" for example. But it'll definitely be helpful for the tinkerers. I can see how its more intuitive for them to sketch on surfaces, though I still wouldn't recommend it.
@@Artificial_Incompetence_Bot yes but if you don’t know what the design should look like in the end, you’re more likely to run into it. For novice users, it would be a frustrating and confusing glitch to run into, especially since it impacts how you resequence transformations (like extrusions, etc).
What do you mean by using datum planes? Do you mean like starting with construction lines, then adding plane objects, then leading towards a more advanced GD&T approach? Like before making many sketches?
Not all curves have a great parameterization. This is one of the problems with NURBS surfaces, which are more like icing on cake. NURBS is so easy if you can use programming, but few other features can depend on their surface (if any)
NURBS uses B-Splines, so it’s an analytic method (i.e., it is very helpful when you need an approximate or “best” solution)
“Bessie you best get your functions of the second kind up in hya”
Also, it is very likely that you’ll be told “NURBS can’t have holes!”, but alas it is truly thine CAD software which canst resolve the “Pants theorem” for thine-st requisite curves. In other words, NURBS on a surface with one hole can be split into two NURBS problems. NURBS for volumes with voids is another matter entirely - still possible, but it’s clearly someone else’s problem (not mine)
I only continue to write, hoping to bamboozle this Bot’s “Pravda” or praxis or wut-have-you?
Open Source is a quality in itself.
For 3D-printing and CNC-cutting, I tested FreeCAD for a while, but had to drop it, and go the Blender route.
I'm very willing to test again :)
I'm curious how useful will it be for you at this point in time. :) Maybe you can leave a follow-up comment.
You using the CAD extensions? I've been getting into 3D printing so I should probably learn them both to some degree but I've been trying to decide what to mess with first
I used Blender for 3d printing some years ago because FreeCAD thwarted my attempts to get proficient with it, whereas I knew Blender since about 1999. But in recent years, I finally broke though and this recent 1.0 RC1 release is so polished that it is just fun to build stuff with it. Now I only to go Blender if it is something really organic that lends itself to low poly modeling plus modifiers.
MY understanding is the Blender is not designed for precise measurements like that. Did that actually work well for you?
@@wisnoskij there is a tool called CAD Sketcher (a blender extension), which is really good, or so i heard, you can do CAD really well in blender, but i don't know about comparing it with a specialized tool like FreeCAD, so only testing we will know for sure.
I have been thinking of getting into 3d modeling for printing. But not having a good solution to do it on my Linux machine basically made this a non-starter. I will begrudgingly use Windows on my work machine, but I refuse to have it installed on my own personal machines.
So thanks FreeCAD for making it a viable option, and thanks Lunduke for letting me know about it!
It's still FreeCAD, so clunky to use and other CAD offerings are still way easier to get into and more productive once you're up to speed on CAD-modelling. Onshape can be used with Linux btw and it's free for hobbyists.
At work I'm sadly bind to some renowned proprietary software, but I'm eager and really looking forward to implement the FreeCad in my worklflow as much as I can, as I'm already doing from approximately version 0.19. Keep the good work FreeCad team!!!!!!
Have used latest weeklies and very exited about freecad hitting stable 1.0. Even if it doesn't hit as hard as the big design softwares, but it is really good option for us that can't use those, or doesn't want to.
Hear hear! As a hobbyist, I appreciate the availability of Freecad, I'll learn it.
There is a slope, but nothing worth anything is easy.
Good to see, love your attitude! I had formal CAD education and I can tell you it's well worth learning FreeCAD, it's extremely powerful (it was way beyond my expectations). FreeCAD might be tricky to wrap your head around in the beginning but it'll force you to use good CAD practices. After you've learned FreeCAD you can easily migrate your skills to any another CAD package, or keep using it and even scale up to a small company if you want. I'd recommend to try stay in the "part design" workbench as much as possible to begin with. Recreating from 2D drawings make great exercises, see if you can find some that contains information of the part volume so you can compare your results. And get a cheap 3D printer! Nothing more rewarding than actually being able to hold your creations!
@@Artificial_Incompetence_Bot thanks for the encouragement!! I have Ender 3 S1 Pro and I've already designed and printed a headphone hook for my cubical at work ❤️ i got to use a few considerations I hqve from 3d printing. What a rewarding experience indeed!
I learned Freecad. Then when I went to export my project I learned Freecad can't export in standard inches. When you use Freecad it'll act like you're using inches but it can't output in inches. So that makes Freecad useless to me. From what I understand it is a fundamental shortcoming with the basic framework of the program and is completely unfixable without abandoning everything and starting over. The lead dev has always been completely against supporting Standard since day one. So he likely did it intentionally. Never trust a kraut.
@@1pcfred In this part of the world we use metric, so I guess the software is designed around it. I never use those inches (apart from maybe monitor sizes), so I did not had the problems you had. Are you sure you did nor looked over some settings?
@@jclosed2516 yeah I'm sure it doesn't work. I'm fairly confident it'll never work too. The lack of support is intentional on the part of the developers. They don't want it to work. So they designed the software so it'll never support Standard. It's a spite move and I can appreciate that.
While it's not fully released just yet (you still need to use the weekly builds) it's fixed a lot of stuff.
Topo naming problem fixed or at least massively better, construction lines are now dotted lines, automatic removal of redundant constraints, the dimensioning tool is now automatic like solidworks, simulation for CAM (at least in 3 axis, but not 4 just yet), CAM with 3d Surface support (slow but works needs an experimental flag setting), CAM for 4th rotary axis (same as surface). Haven't tested assembly3 with it yet (which is the solidworks type of assemblies) but that will hopefully be fixed in relation to the topo naming. Has a really good solidworks easy to use feel to it.
Calling the TNP fixes complete is… optimistic. It’s a start I guess.
@@rainmannoodles I'm guessing there are situations where it can occur, but so far I've not been able to trigger it myself (before I could quite easily). I would also say another one thats probably overlooked is the auto removal of redundant constraints with a complicated sketch which helps a lot to avoid over constrained sketches
This is something I love to see, when I was still in university (mechanical engineering) I had a friend that didn’t wanted to use Windows no matter what, he used Octave instead of MatLab with no problem, but when it came to 3D CAD, he has to work like ten times harder than everyone else to make it work on FreeCAD. Since then it has been getting better and better.
I love it, i already got materials here to study it, gonna specialize at FreeCAD.
Good! I'm formally trained in Simens NX and PTC Creo and definitely think it's worth learning FreeCAD. Tested it for 3 months now, wasn't hard to migrate from previous CAD knowledge. I'm amazed how strong it is and completely free, even for commercial use. Require no internet connection and works with every platform. It's the best time to get in on FreeCAD. Considering how many small companies and start ups will use this in the future. My advice is start with "Part Design" workbench and use it as far as you can. Classic CAD exercises is to recreate a 3D part from a 2D drawing and match the volume. If you want to build unbreakable parts I suggest you look into MIT Open Course Ware. Or there might also be youtubers who teaches you to use datum planes and expressions. When you feel like you master the Part Design-workbench you can move into Assembly-workbench (advanced CAD). In assembly you combine multiple parts into a bigger assembly with joints. Here the challenge is to pick the correct assembly constraints, the concept is similar to sketch constraints, but now we have movement in 6 degrees of freedom, 3 rotation and 3 translation. Your goal is to lock all except the one you want to move. There are tables of all constraints that show how any degrees of freedom each constraint locks, useful for beginners. Hope it helps, Good luck!
Had some time to test 1.0 RC, it's way better than I expected. You now have the ability to create one large sketch containing all the features you need and the apply features on selected closed lines exclusively. Gone are the days for Master/Slave sketches for every individual feature. This keeps the construction history clean. This workflow is more like NX and other big CAD package. Coming from NX I really like the improvements and changes to the workflow.
Graduated mechanical engineering and now I lost all my CAD licenses. So I just happened to have switched to freecad last week! I got my start in catia V5, and honestly it's not so different. What I love is the extremely feature rich plugin and optional workbench ecosystem. I just wish those were a little more user friendly, but it makes sense because their super expert-focused
Why not Onshape, Solid Edge or *shudder* Fusion? FreeCAD still is severly lacking compared to even the free versions of proprietary CAD software.
@@iliketoast-q9b probably because all those "solutions" come with drawbacks. Fusion started as great free software for "small" users, but gets restriction after restriction. It also does not work without logging in, and the amount of work you can have is restricted, and don't get me started on cloud save only. Other software (like Onshape) has the same problem. No internet connection, no work.
My work has been (I am retired now) electronic design and repair. I often come across weird shaped contraptions in apparatus than are broken and need to be replaced. Often those parts are not available any more, so I have to re-design them and print them on a 3D printer. FreeCAD is very capable of doing just these things. Yes - It has a learning curve, but I could use it after half a day, and was printing my first objects a few hours later. I have used it ever since...
FreeCad 1.0rc1 vs 0.21.2 is 400% better for me!
Now it is actually usable!
completely agree
Finally. A Lunduke video without any drama or screaming "that's crazy!!!" In response of every event imaginable. Just calm reporting.
One other effect of a viable Linux CAD program, one that starts getting a notable adoption, might convince companies like AutoCAD that Linux is a viable platform for them to support.
It's not a company
Has Adobe ported Photoshop, Illustratior, and Premiere because GIMP, Inkscape, and Kdenlive exist? Nope. What makes you think that Autodesk will be any different?
Also, FreeCAD has been out for a very long time: the last stable is 0.21.2. That you can make a CAD work on platforms other than Windows was a point that has been proven for a very long time.
Maya is the only adobe product worth using any more and given their terrible practices I would choose Free CAD over AutoCAD if I needed it and it was at all possible. But in general adobe is a decayed mess of outdated and scammy products at this point.
They know it's the preferred platform. MS pays companies to not support Linux.
We had Pro/ENGINEER on Linux a long time ago (I believe that it was ported from IRIX or HP-UX). I believe that it was the first and most powerful CAD we had on Linux. Sadly, its last Linux release was in 2004 or 2005.
Congratulations to the developers and users 🎉 Great news for Linux user. I do all my cad designing in FreeCAD.
OMG! I've been waiting for this for years, I'm so excited!
I'm in the "want to use Linux for a daily driver but need CAD for work" group, so this is amazing news. I tried FreeCAD a while back and it was unfortunately unusable at the time. Here's hoping that's changed
I work at a makerspace where the entire lab is based on open-source. All the computers are linux, and FreeCAD is used for design/production for Laser, 3D Print, and CNC mill. We teach courses that are about 18 hours (over six weeks). I recently tried out the RC1 version with a group of students, and it mostly went well. The one major problem we hit is the "overlay" option in the UI. I recommend disabling that in the preferences immediately. Students were losing track of panels, getting extremely frustrated. It is a feature intended to make the Model and Task panels hide away when not in use, but it just does not work well. Other than that - pretty smooth sailing!
make sure everything gets updated to 1.0! 0.21.1 is unusable with this update, i refuse to go back.
i have used it and can do anything i want with it, the scripting feature is very good, thanks to the devs
Freecad doesn't actually support Standard even if it looks like it does while you're using it. Freecad can't export in Standard units. When you try the scale of your project will be completely off. Which seems like an easy enough fix to me. But from what I've heard the internal engine of Freecad is such a mess it isn't. It is fundamentally flawed.
@@1pcfred what is standard?
@@rezah336 standard is short for the international industrial standard inch. Which is often confused with Imperial but that's because people are ignorant.
ignorant
adjective
1. lacking knowledge or awareness in general; uneducated or unsophisticated
Example: he was told constantly that he was ignorant and stupid
Now I hope that's no one you know.
@@1pcfred i use si units, but i have never had problems with scaling
@@rezah336 right, You don't use standard so the problem wouldn't crop up for you. Freecad handles everything internally in metric. The lead developer of the program was never interested in supporting standard so he never designed the software so it could ever support standard in any meaningful way. Switching the units freecad can appear to support standard but it just can't export anything in standard units. At least that's been my experience. I haven't tried freecad in a number of years now but I don't suspect anything's changed. The lead devs just are not interested in supporting standard units. If I was a cynical type I'd say the lack of support is malicious intent on their part. Being as I have had the displeasure of interacting with one of them in the past.
We ran Apollo workstations in our engineering faculty for five years. Their "Unix" environments, both BSD and SysV, were emulated on top of the native DomainOS, which btw was written in Objective Pascal. The Unix emulation had major shortcomings and unresolvable bugs.
The CAD software we used ran under DomainOS. For us the Unix emulations were unusable for anything other than simple single-user/single-task applications.
Object Pascal, no "ive". I've asked myself for years why that's the name, considering Objective-C had a more sensical name, but whatever, it's still a great language anyway.
Looking forward to trying the improved interface. Maybe I can finally leave SolveSpace behind.
I spent a few days learning FreeCAD/Ondsel ES... it's very worthy software. I'm wayy- faster in Blender, but if I wanna loft a boat hull now, I'll use Ondsel because it makes the process easy and fast as compared to the Blender way of doing things.
When it can directly compete with AutoCAD and revit, that's it it's game over.
haha :) it can already compete with SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Onshape, Fusion 360, Inventor, PTC Creo. I was laughing because that form of CAD you mentioned is considered far more primitive in the CAD world. It only comes down to the building sector being more conservative in its production methods. So they simply don't have the need for this type of advanced CAD programs. With that said I'm pretty sure It should be surpassing mentioned CAD in short if it hasn't already. I'd look into the BIM workbench if I was you, and remember you can turn on the Python console in FreeCAD, that will give you the Python for every mouse click. Driving modeling with Python is rapidly becoming a stronger tool with today's advanced language models like chat GPT. Even for us non programmers. If you only need 2D drawings there's also another free open source CAD project named LibreCAD, it's more like AutoCAD.
AutoCAD released Fusion 360 for free to hamstring open source development work. It worked too. Fusion is just good enough to quell momentum in open source development. It was a brilliant strategic move on their part.
@@1pcfred I dropped Fusion for FreeCAD, because I hate to be restricted, being forced to be always-on-line and having a mandatory account and subscription. And lately they also restrict what you can and cannot do. I don't like that.
But hey - Everyone his or hers choice...
Jokes on you, I've been using FreeCAD for a while now for my home projects, like a loft bed, a trailer enclosure (basically my tool garage) and a secure (anti porch pirates) parcel box.
Been using freecad for a while now. It's becoming a pretty robust as a cad cam workflow at this point, by .19 I found I was actually trusting the gcode it was producing. I wish it would focus a bit more on lathe specific gcode as it's really way more set up to do milling work. But it is possible to produce lathe tool paths if your creative enough lol aside from that it's by far better than the early say 2000-2003 pro engineer or solid works, actually is more capable of either of those as of now. Aside from organic modeling which there is blender for, it's a darn good thing.
I learned NX/unigraphics back in early 2000 it ran on the Solaris platform back then haha. It wasn't nearly as strong as FreeCAD is now, back then fillet/rounds was nice on paper but always crashed in practice. Have you noticed that you can export your quad models from Blender using the "export to iges" plug-in in Blender. Import it as either NURBS surfaces or solids and continue work on them in FreeCAD?
I actually use a lot of openscad.
OpenSCAD is compatible with freecad, you can use openscad for modeling, then freecad for assembly, FEA, CAM, CFD, animation, and many others things
This should be the most necessary improving for linux/mac world! Better graphic support, GPU use, professional CAD is the most necessary thing. Congratulations FreeCAD team!
When I met you at the start of all the insanity in lockdowns at a BWW, we discussed AutoCADs use of "AutoLISP" and "VisuaLISP" which is a VBA integration into AutoCAD.
I can tell you that in the past 3 years, the entire industry is looking to dump AutoDesk in very much the way people are dumping Adobe right now.
Edit: I tried it. I can tell you that this may one day be able to replace AutoCAD, but 1.0 ain't it chief. It's so far away from it, that I may make by first video ever just to explain why.
Do it! There's so many ways to help out the project and doing a breakdown of the solutions limitations would at this point probably be even more useful than minor PRs on the code base.
Nobody is going to really challenge Autodesk anytime soon, but FreeCAD 1.0 is a big step... you can now legitimately make the case to use only FreeCAD for professional design work, though such conviction will be rewarded with additional work! Hard to say how valuable software freedom is worth, to me, it's worth more then the headaches of putting up ~somewhat~ inferior software.
@@JohnnyThund3r I hate using the term, but I am a professional AutoCAD user. I have used SketchUp professionally. I have screwed around in REVIT. I have programmed solutions in both AutoLISP and VisualLISP.
I have modeled in probably half a dozen programs.
Unless there is some skin, plugin, or mod of this software that significantly modifies it, I would classify this software as barely usable. No, I am not joking.
I just followed/subscribed to you in case you do it.
@@JohnnyThund3r That's the weird part. The foundations needed to challenge AutoCAD and Revit are there in a lot of programs, but they don't because of X or Y or just simply making a decision with their design. Every CAD program is iterative, too. AutoCAD is, iirc, using the Maya engine.
It's a choice to not challenge them.
I'm already using freecad for designing combat robots and other things. These improvements will make my life so much easier.
Hey, welcome back, Lunduke! Missed ya!
FreeCAD is awesome. Before 1.0 it had really rough edges in the UI so only determined nerds used it much. 1.0 is a quantum leap forward in usability, I love it!
This is my experience too. The last couple of months of development are incredible. Or, more likely, the last couple of months of these long-running features finished, are incredible.
Actually, the new version of Ubuntu will probably be a larger hindrance to people using Linux. I tried Ubuntu for ~1 month, ~1 month ago, it was a train wreck. For a basic, entry-level Linux distro, it was broken, glitchy, and dropped ever ball it could have dropped. Fedora, my normal distro, is far more usable, friendly, stable, and welcoming. Thinking back to old Ubuntu releases, they were a thing of beauty for anyone wanting to check out Linux, but now? I honestly couldn't recommend any Ubuntu Desktop version.
Xubuntu was decent 10 years ago
I definitely agree. Ubuntu was my starter and I absolutely loved it. Last few years I've tried giving it another shot and I can't stand Snaps. Constantly bugging about restarting apps, random weird bugs among other things.
Maybe PopOS will be the spiritual successor to Ubuntu from its golden years
I had this same issue over a decade ago... Canonical is just weird, Masters of disaster... Can never recommend default Ubuntu after they installed Unity on me.
Damn it! I just want Gnome 2 back!
@@octomancerHonestly I loved Unity, my biggest qualm was having to install a tweak tool to do basic customizations.
I could even see myself using it today if it were well-supported
Linux Mint. Based on Ubuntu but without all the BS
Cant wait top try it out. Previously I attempted to use FreeCAD but it was horrendously buggy, also user interface was ... hard to use. I hope for great improvement in both areas.
The user interface was still horrendous as of 2 weeks ago unfortunately. The glitches were annoying but not as bad as I had heard so I think they have made progress on that. I really hope they redesign the user interface eventually, I would love for it to be a viable alternative to Fusion 360 & the like.
@@Marty234 The workbenches are developed by different teams, so there might be a slight lack of naming/user interface convention. But let me explain a method I think you will have more success with, imagine that "part-design" is your main workbench. It's probably called Solids/Parametric in other CAD programs, and "part"-workbench is more for deep level geometry work like stitching surfaces together into solids, and fixing bad geometry (often called Surface in other packages). If you want to create unbreakable parametric models, name your dimensional constraints and then link to them using expressions (the "e" in the parameter field") Example: instead of entering a number in your dimensional length you can enter "=" followed by "Sketch001.Constraints.YourDimensionsName". Sketch on Datum-planes instead of surfaces, and move them in place by linking their translation in an axis, again as an expression "=" and "Pad.Length".
This is an improvement but sorry a python based program is NOT fast enough.
just the other day i tried to build something slightly more complex and the UI was taking 5mins to respond, this is not acceptable performance.
isnt it c++? just the GUI is python
FreeCAD 1.0 is a great milestone, but it's still far from viability in a professional setting. How do I know? CAD software is one thing keeping me from going Linux only, and I use just use Rhinoceros as a freelancing side job, not even an actual parametric CAD or my actual job.
Imho, GIMP 3.0, which we're going to hear about in the next few weeks, a couple months in the absolute worst case, is going to be the bigger release of the two: it's far closer to viability, and one of its professional niches are youtubers, and that's going to translate in more of them trying Linux sticking to it, thus better advertising.
no release of GIMP can ever considered "big" until they fix the near unuseable UI
can you give examplesof what's missing in linux CAD software ?
@@emperorpalpatine6080 Multiple pieces in a single sketch is sure one.
But even more than missing features, FreeCAD makes GIMP look like a UX/UI masterpiece, and everyone says GIMP's UI is terrible (which it's actually not, except for a few things, GIMP is really just missing basic features): the various editing modes are hidden behind an anassuming dropdown menu, every time you try to do something the log drawns you in error massages that mean something to you only if you made the program, and really everything is clunky and unintuitive.
There's also that DWG support is a must if you're cooperating with others, since everyone uses AutoCAD, and FreeCAD only does it via external programs (LibreDWG and Oda File Converter), and neither of them is good.
@@emperorpalpatine6080 in freecad, 1.0 solves one of its biggest problems, but its still and will always be a really slow program because its python based.
the other day i needed to make a 3d model of a QFN-80 package, nothing hard, quite simple stuff, the sketch at a point was taking 5 mins to respond to inputs, it took me hours to sketch the part because of this, hopefully i dont have to explain that this isn't acceptable performance
@@cj09beira the Python calls a feature programmed in C++. So you can turn on the Python Console in FreeCAD to see what Python command will call upon the feature you used, that way you can easily create your own macros using Python. I'm no programmer so don't quote me on how this works but it's pretty common in CAD to use Python as a console language. Did you check if you ran out of RAM? Do you have previous CAD knowledge? It's normal that it takes time to update the geometry ones you exit the sketch, but did changes inside the sketch take 5 min? Seem's like a rather big sketch for a CAD program that only does features on a singe manifold sketch...? I'm curious because I haven't run into this yet, but I never had a problem with the Topological Naming Problem either, because I use Datum planes and expressions.
Very interesting video.
I know nothing about CAD, photo editing or video editing software (apart from what the software is being used for, obviously) but I still watch videos of experts using applications like _Affinity_ or _Da Vinci,_ and comparing them to their Windows equivalent ... simply because each sophisticated application offering a real alternative to Windows-only software is another step towards the goal of making Linux as a whole better for everybody.
I use freecad everyday, I love it. Is 1.0 due this year though?
I suspect we'll see it by the end of October.
@@joes144 That's my guess too. But we will see...
I'm watching this with interest for a while, it is not quite there but looks promising
I tried it out before 1.0 and the source code was really easy to modify to my ends to make it work how I wanted... the way the code was set up was ingenious to make a complex interactive object operation so simple to implement. I was thrilled about it! Addons just a python script so easy to read modify and debug!
Windows is a bastion for CAD. Any serious CAD software for macOS and Linux is highly appreciated.
Recently started to learn FreeCAD and it's awesome! God bless this project.
Not purely focussed on CAD but certainly very capable, Blender has been around for quite a while for Linux.
Looking forward to the 1.0 release. I use 0.21 at the moment for all my odds and sods 3d printer designs, despite its foibles. The thing which I appreciate the most about it is that it is not at all cloud based. All your files are yours, on your Personal Computer PC and thus you can never be held to ransom.
Great video! keep um coning! YES! finally a positive one!
Joining the hypetrain! I use Freecad Dailey, and i love it! Great software and dev team.
I've been using the release candidate 1.0, honestly sometimes it gets frustrating, but damn the absolute potential of FreeCAD is leaps ahead of other badly priced closed source software solution, we can have something really special here.
what about the people in the hobbies space?? I use freecad to model all my 3D pieces. It's a hate and love history. I hope that with this release, the things improve ;)
I do CAD and machine work somewhat regularly, a friend of mine who's also a fairly hardcore linux user tried turning me onto FreeCAD, its a joke to call it CAD software - but nonetheless I appreciate the effort and I dream that one day it'll replace my windows VM running SOLIDWORKS.
why is it a joke?
@@rezah336 It's a parametric design suite that cannot handle upstream parameter updates without breaking your entire working model. Exporting is also broken, or at least has been prior to 1.0 (I'll see how that works when I eventually update it), it's a coin flip whether your carefully constrained arch segments will invert themselves. Naturally, as a long-time Linux user, I love it, and wouldn't trade it for anything else.
@@Cris-bj7ee I don't want to be to hard on you guys, I think FreeCAD should be used by hobbyist as well as professionals. But if your models crash its not because of FreeCAD, the topological naming problem was never a problem for engineers. I don't care if I'm using a $100k Simens NX license I still wouldn't sketch on surfaces. My advice is sketch instead on Datum-planes and move them in place by driving their placement by an "expression" that links to your feature, like "Pad.Length" or "Sketch.Constraints.Width" for example.
@@rezah336 There's nothing wrong with it, I come from mainly NX, Pro-E or now PTC Creo and tested most other CAD packages during my student years. It's a very solid CAD package, no pun intended, reminds more of PTC Creo than NX. But as of now its far from as intuitive as other CAD packages, stems from its development form. But you can Create just as good and unbreakable models in FreeCAD as you can in NX today. The only thing FreeCAD is currently lacking in is some surface modelling features. Class A modeling for the car industry would be challenging, but that's true for most commercial CAD packages as well. As of now I don't think there's any model you couldn't build in FreeCAD that you could in Fusion 360, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Inventor at least (this has long been true). Advanced surface models would better be subdivision modeled in Blender and exported as NURBS via "export to iges" or similar plugins. To later be stitched into solids in FreeCAD though. FreeCAD lacks own subdivision modeling, however such task are still more suited for programs like Blender/Maya/Cinema4d/3DSMAX. Class A surface models are more suited for Rhino/Alias/NX/Catia.
@@Artificial_Incompetence_Bot datum planes aren't necessary for this. They only make sense of using multiple sketches attached to a single plane. Otherwise sketches can be manipulated the same way as a datum so why add redundant dependency?
I've been using FreeCad on my Windows machine for last 2 years, making small parts to feed my 3d printing curiosity. Most other options are cloud-locked and with a hefty price tag.Freecad had it's problems. But it worked, didn't ask whether i'm from the polite half of the planet, and didn't have an issue with me selling the prints/drawings.
Have you not tried Blender for 3D printing designs? Also, what's the polite half of the planet?
freecad is complete nerd oriented, the work flow is unintuitive and is painful. I personally hate freecad, it's a time waster. I want to be productive when CADing. a lot of people have 3D printers, they need a good free CAD software, but freecad is not it.
However I will take a look at it again and hopefully it's much more stable and doesn't keep crashing or give confusing errors.
UPDATE: I gave FreeCAD another go after maybe 2 years? it's gotten better and doesn't crash every few operations. I actually going to switch over to using it more. TIP start off in "Part Design" workbench, it will make your life a lot easier to design.
I'm sorry you find it too taxing to learn, but I do understand. CAD programs are great for engineers if you want to take one of your designs into mass production. But every tinker might not start out with those needs, I think it might be more suiting and rewarding for you to learn another type of program more used in the Prototyping stage, for Product designers. I would recommend Blender, it's also free and open source. You can use a technique called subdivision modeling in it. Subtract and add shapes and carve out your creation, it's preferred by artists and product designers. It will also take a while to learn, but it can create 3D shapes very fast, more like 3D sketching.
@@Artificial_Incompetence_Bot I understand how CAD works. I was using DesignSpark for a while and then switched over to using OnShape. Blender is not suited for CAD but many use it for that, I find blender to be pailful to use.
I did take another look at FreeCAD and I have to say I am very pleased with it. It's not crashing or spitting confusing errors like it use to. I took some time to re-learn the basics of FreeCad and I can see myself using it more and more. It still have its ugly warts and quirks, but it's improved quite a bit since I last gave it a try, maybe 2 years back.
Thanks for your input. I'm going to switch to using FreeCAD, so I can keep my design on my own PC.
My CNC machine sits and gathers dust today because Freecad can't export anything in inches. While you're working with Freecad it can appear to be using inches but it is not. At least that's how it was when I used it. The lead dev of Freecad has zero interest in ever fixing that and the contributors I don't think are in any position to fix it either.
Happy Daze! and my 3d Connexion Spacemouse should be fine also.
Thanks for sharing! 👍
The movie industry switched from IRIX to Linux when sgi folded and is still running Linux to this day, the CAD sector was undecided. Some switched to Windows, some to Linux, and so a bunch of professional applications were available (usually the very expensive, very high-end stuff like pro/E Wildfire), but over time, pretty much the entire industry slowly switched to Windows. The software vendors dropped Linux support completely, or in some cases only offer Linux versions to large customers on request. My guess is that VFX companies had significant internal development resources with a UNIX background, and their in-house software was written for IRIX, so switching to Linux was just easier. The engineering companies ran UNIX because PCs simply weren't powerful enough, they didn't actually care about the operating system.
I love FreeCAD, and I honestly use it for every kind of modelling I have to do. What it can't do, OpenSCAD does.
Interestingly enough, that Unix-like workflow that pushes people away from it, makes it at least 3x faster to use than something like Fusion360. And in recent releases, the GUI even feeds you a workflow.
What capabilities does OpenSCAD offer that FreeCAD lacks? FreeCAD is far more powerful than OpenSCAD.
@@Pulsar2000 Like I said, I use FreeCAD for everything, and OpenSCAD for those wizard moments when there's no tool in FreeCAD that works
Maybe a complex geometry is making it blow up, maybe I have some complex surface snapping that I can't model in any other way and it's making FreeCAD wig out
Excessive complexity breaks the logic of FreeCAD, and complex objects made from dozens of simple objects are difficult to work with in a digital 3D space
The scrip based modelling of OpenSCAD solves these problems FreeCAD runs into, at the expense of re-introducing the problems that FreeCAD solves
So really, they're mutually exclusive use-cases
My issue with it is that it still looks like IronCAD from the 2000s, when I was in college, and it's even less intuitive to use.
The amount of useful open source software these days is incredible
I work for a big electrical contractor and all their desktops and labtops use windows software. The construction trades need to go open source, plus will save them money.
Not possible until we remove the corruption in Western governments. Look at Germany's "attempts" to use Open Source and see how Microsoft "solves" legal issues.
Hmm, maybe I should have another look. In my opinion, one of the areas where Linux/open source was really weak so far is 3D mechanical CAD. I have KiCAD for electronic design and several solutions for 2D drawings. But 3D CAD with FreeCAD had been a PITA, so I gave up on that. I hope it's better now.
CAD is the biggest weakness of Linux at the moment, well together with audio (default volume at 100% is a big problem). It is one of the big reasons why people are forced to use Windows. So it is great when FreeCAD improves.
Excellent converage
the constraints in sketcher threw me off, but forced me to start using shortcuts lol
I use libreCAD frequently, but not for mech engineering of complete components. The 2D classic-autocad format is really good for solving and visualizing moderately complex geometry problems, and even for really basic stuff like laying out a garden and measuring surface areas or even what angle do I cut this 2×4 that needs to be tangent to this other widget in the chicken coop. Like electronic graph paper with automated calipers, compass, and protractor.
I agree, I wish someone was attacking CAD at this basic level. Something between autocad, sketchup and Fusion.
This is good for Engineering & Architectural companies.
If the user interface has had significant improvements and has features for 3D printing etc it could also be good for the hobbyist and "Home Engineers".
The user interface was un-intuitive, so I have been hoping for improvements there.
I will be giving the RC 1 a spin as soon as I can.
I've been trying FreeCAD about once per year for a while. It always comes off as a case study in committee design and volunteer construction. The horrible workflows and user interface are subjective, and I confess I'm a novice, but what's not subjective are the straight-up malfunctions which inevitably arise after an hour or two of usage. And every time, I'm assured that FreeCAD is now "The best it's ever been!" Anyway, I'm sure I'll try it again when the next opportunity arises. Maybe this time is different.
Free cad is great. Some say the workflow is weird and clunky, but it was the first GUI cad program i used. I didn't have much trouble learning it with nothing to compare it to other than OpenSCAD. I actually had more trouble learning fusion 360 because i was used to free cad. I still prefer OpenSCAD and now CADQuery(but i hate python) over gui cad programs.
Free cad has a openscad workbench that can export .step files. Pretty cool when it works.
Most people just don't understand the workflow because they never learnt CATIA. If you know CATIA, its the exact same workflow, just with a drop-down workbench selector instead of a workbench menu.
Thanks Bryan.
I used to know someone who worked in drainage planning, in the mid 2010's they where still booting DOS for one app. The upgrade cost was 80K for a single user, if it works why change.
For something like freeCAD it may take years, if they can get students/UNI's to convert to the app a generation of people will jump over.
I use it for all my 3d printed prototypes
That's awesome news! I'll try to deploy to some architects just to see how it'd work. Even for basic viewing it'd be awesome it would work. I was often asked about some ifc viewer. maybe freecad would be great for that.
Brilliant video 👍 Immediately sub’ed… BR, Per (Denmark)
The most important Linux release of 2024 is the Kernel 6.12
Why exactly?
@@encapsulatio because it will be the LTS
Brics has been a LONG TIME Linux supported release. Compare Brics to AutoDesk, not FreeCAD to AutoCAD. As someone who lives in CAD applications, it's not fair to expect FreeCAD to compete. However, it's pretty freaking good for what it is. Heck, QCAD is pretty amazing too, and KiCAD kicks major butt for its userbase.
We took out 3DSMax, now we need to take out AutoDesk and Adobe.
Unfortunatly it will probably appeal only beginner as you said expert Cad engineer will complain that it took longer to make the same thing.
I will test it as soon as I can.
No, but what Ubuntu will do is with the next release make it a 1 click install to get FreeCAD and all the other programs we need. I've been running Debian for decades, often just doing upgrades in place without breaking things. A huge deal, it might seem boring, but boring is good !
It's always good to have options, but I'd say that if you're using FreeCAD instead of Blender to design 3D printing parts, you might want to consider a change.
I use FreeCad for 3D Printing.
The learning curve with Freecad is steep, but still no worse than Solidworks was.
Im glad I took the time to learn Freecad when I did, because now the "features" will be on the way!
Congratulations to those at Freecad for the release of v 1.0!
The way I have always seen the situation is the CADD software dictates the OS, the OS doesn't dictate the CADD software. If Autodesk switched development to Linux or MacOS then every autocad user would switch their OS without hesitation. (Same for CATIA, Solidworks, etc; the whole workshop will be molded around the CADD software.)
Sure hope v1.0 improves things a great deal.
Moving from Fusion360 to FreeCad was torture.
wait until you take your designs in f360 and convert them to freecad to make this statement :) . I don't have too many, but certainly is a hard puzzle sometimes. I'm not even talking about finding bugs in the original designs.
@@julian7 my statement stands. I've already done that.
It's torture.
I'm that engineer
Rhino grasshopper
I often use 0.21.2
It's very hard and not intuitive.
after numerous youtube tutorials I kind of can do what I want but not easily.
Right! I eventually decided that spending money & time setting up a windows VM was unfortunately the better option
@@Marty234Spending money setting up a VM?
@mgord9518 ya I have to buy a 2nd GPU to do GPU pass through, it's also not a simple thing to do. Just running a normal VM gets horrible performance out of F360 (and pretty much everything else : )
This is great.
Now if we could just get tax software, we'll be golden
Linux accounting software has been around for more than a decade, GnuCash was certified by the tax authority in Britain in 2006 and exports to Quicken/QuickBooks if that's what your accountant needs.
Or, you can just print out the tax forms you need and run queries in GnuCash to fill in the blanks.
That it isn't some kind of certified global standard doesn't change the fact that it has been doing _the accounting books_ correctly for nearly twenty years, and _accounting methods_ *do* have to meet a certified global standard!
The next versjon of Ubuntu will probably add a lot more, especially user tracking and ads, but hell - it'll include FreeCAD 1.0!!!!
2024 gonna be the year of the linux engineer baybeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Looks like I'll need to give it a try next time I want to make 3D model to print.. Tried FreeCAD half a year ago and after hours of being stuck on weird underconstrained / overconstrained errors I gave up, opened onshape and within half an hour I had the model I wanted (I followed exactly the same steps as I did in FreeCAD but it just worked).
I'll happily leave onshape because their license is meh.. but it's only thing I can use (everything else is too expensive for how much I would use it, not to mention linux support)
Freecad is great, the only thing I dislike it was that its 2024 and there isn't a dark mode.
Go to preferences, choose a theme like ProDark, or in the RC1 version it will offer you a choice when you first launch the program.
I keep 2 operating systems (win+linux) just for this reason. Although FreeCAD is good but still there are other options which are better and more acceptable widely.
UX better be good this time...
Surprised that old Apollo workstations are the example to contrast to (reasonable, though, if that was your working experience). In Windows, MicroStation or AutoCAD are very popular, and my first question for FreeCAD would be... can it be scripted? (which is a prominent feature in MicroStation or AutoCAD). Glad to see that FreeCAD runs an embedded Python interpreter.
Parametric CAD is the one thing missing from linux for me.
assembly workbench? I might give it another go. I have made a few freeCAD tutorials.
Good timing. Just wanted to make my very own 3d printable PC case. Since I have to learn CAD from the scratch anyway why not start with FreeCAD?
Excited to see freecad go 1.0, but this is not new software and has been available and progressing for quite some time. I’m not quite sure why the presentation here assumes (pretends?) like this hasn’t been available for years.
That is AWESOMEEEEEE. We now need Affinity for linux and are ready to ditch Windows
Same issue with digital audio software. I can't change OS if the most important software I use is incompatible with Linux.
Hahah i have been using all my windows VST plugins on Linux for 8 years now, it's certainly possible to install digital audio software on linux, even if it's windows software
Dude. I compiled a custom Linux kernel specifically for doing digital audio work in _2001._
Wah harder.
@@davidgoodnow269 "Just compile your own kernel"! "How come normies don't use Linux?!"
@@toby2581 I had just bought a magazine with the installation disk to start with Linux two weeks before. I found out what was causing the problems, learned about what I would need to do to fix it, and my boss let me print out the entire kernel man file on a printer at work. I used that to figure out what options I needed to set, and how.
Refusing to use your brain is a _you_ problem!