I tried this out on my laptop running KDE Plasma Wayland, and I was very positively surprised, my touchpad gestures actually made sense, I could pan around by dragging 2 fingers, zoom by pinching, and even rotate the view by rotating 2 fingers! Back when I was using Fusion 360 on Windows I needed to remap a keyboard key to the middle mouse button for it to be usable
Is there a plan to allow you to import SVG's and pad or cut from them?
I was using some freecad a bit, but importing and manipulating an svg onto an object was very painful. I'm sure some of it was due to inexperience, but I have simple requirements, so if there is a simple tool that allows that (along with the other expected basics), it would be very useful for me.
Very cool to see another contender in the open source 3D CAD space. I really want to like and use FreeCAD, but with Fusion360 (where my account has been banned because I accidentally once used it from my company's VPN to model something for private use) and Onshape I am just so much faster and tear out way less hair.
Been there, done that. I also decided to move to FreeCAD and it was a real pain at first. But I got used to it surprisingly soon. I found two Youtube channels really useful:
- https://www.youtube.com/@OffsetCAD - a lot of practice exercises. Just watching these is already helpful, working together even more so. It helped to remove a lot of "how do I ...?" road blocks for me.
I see Onshape has a free tier with some features missing (such as simulation). Also "all data is saved in a public workspace".
I am willing to pay for software but all CAD software seems to offer subscription only that is quite expensive (the Standard tier of Onshape is about 150 Euros a month). I'd love to have something like the former Sketchup and would pay 200 or even 300 Euro to "own" the software.
Something like doesn't seem to exist anymore and therefore I am biting the bullet and learn FreeCAD although I gave up on it at least once. The videos by "Adventures in creation" are quite good I think, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_lDwWaB4Jc
Problem with onshape is that most computation is done in the cloud and the free has been throttled a lot the last year or so imo, so you just constantly wait for sketches or extrusions to open or changes to apply. A minute or more sometimes.
Hopefully he can find a way to fix the problem of broken models due to invalid vertex/edge references on fillets/chamfers/etc.. when changing features.
This is a problem even script based programs cadquery/declaracad don't really solve.
i was able to get this building (https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/issues/3) and running on debian trixie. worth noting that the workflow seems to be mostly keyboard driven. you can press space to open a modal toolbox with options to draw/constrain/etc.
FreeCAD is an intuitive UI nightmare. There are always 2-3 different tools that do the same but each with its own limitations. The error messages even in the error console are too cryptic. I have tried over and over to switch to FreeCAD from fusion but I have wasted too much time spending hours trying to figure stupid crap.
Other tools like KiCAD are so much better. Even Blender which can be very complex just works.
It's really amazing. I'm a little worried that it's not going to last forever though, I'm not sure what the plan upstream is and how much is going to get merged, and it's literally just one person maintaining it as far as I can tell.
JFTR, FCStd-files produced by RealThunder's LinkStage[0] (fork of FreeCAD) is not fully backward compatible with an official FreeCAD app, and wise versa.
So, if you are planning to use LinkStage app for some large project, be ready to use only one app for the whole project and be ready to lost in whole or in part compatibility with the users of an official FreeCAD.
"While FreeCAD technically does everything I need, the way it's implemented isn't quite to my liking. My biggest pain points with it are the modal sketcher that only works in 2D, no constraints in 3D for extrusions and the perils of referencing things in the design.
Solvespace on the other hand gets the workflow part right, but falls short by not importing STEP and the geometry kernel not supporting chamfers and fillets."
3D constraints are really interesting. I can see a lot of potential.
But also, 2D Sketching is a nice easy "Stay in your comfort zone" model that keeps as much work as possible in 2D where it's easier to think about, and encourages 2.5D stuff that's easy to understand. For basic functional items it's nice. For other stuff... 3D constraints seem pretty interesting.
Honestly, OpenSCAD has a great UI - it's everything else that sucks about it. OpenSCAD's core advantage is that if you can code, then it is so damn simple; cube sphere cylinder variables modules rotate translate (and if you want to be really fancy: hull union intersect difference), that's all you need for 99% of projects and it fights onto a half-page cheatsheet.
The problem with OpenSCAD is that it's fundamentally really dumb; it doesn't have constraints, you usually just create shapes additively but then you have awful Z-fighting because the engine sucks, and the solution is "just barf epsilons everywhere lol" (which is pure cope - that's not a solution, that's an awkward workaround that requires a bunch of pointless busywork (and more importantly, forces you to figure out stuff about your model that you legitimately don't care about) because the engine is incapable).
I would love to see a successor to OpenSCAD that keeps its IDE-style interface (and no, that doesn't mean using pycharm - the beauty of OpenSCAD is that you have a minimal functional DSL and the GUI is built around the DSL and its use-case) but finds an elegant method of integrating constraints, basically anything to do with curves, that sort of stuff.
Openscad does have constraints, they just look different. It is an imperative ui so it has imperative constraints. Most cad programs have a declarative ui and declarative constraints.
However I have to admit, I too would love an imperative ui with declarative constraints. I have a hard time visualizing how that would work, but that is probably because I lack imagination.
SALOME is an OpenCascade frontend that nobody seems to know about, perhaps because it's pitched for CFD meshing. But it's basically a more focused and stable FreeCAD.
