I want to like it but it’s easily the least intuitive option
It has been too buggy for me to use unfortunately. Unable to select areas for pads for example.
That’s not a bug, that’s how FreeCAD works. You don’t select areas, you can select either the entire sketch or individual wires to Pad. Which is a different verb to Extrude.
But that genuinly didn’t work too. Also there was a tutorial video that did select areas.
It’s possible that was for a fork or experimental branch, I don’t think it’s in the standard issue.
Same for me. I want to love it, but the usability is just not there. Moving/rotating the view feels unnatural no matter what settings I used. Not being able to extrude multiple things from one sketch was a big blocker. The external reference import for sketches on an existing surface was unintuitive, slow, and fragile.
I use it regularly for my 3d printer, nice simple software, but be warned it has quirks…
Still able to do 90% of the stuff I want to do
Yeah learning freecad was a huge pain. Hiwever it does support most things so at least the featureset is good.
It’s very quirky compared to Fusion360. If they made it at least a little bit smoother to use, at least for my tastes in CAD Software; I would be all in.
Yeah I am having too much friction getting Fusion360 to work on my Linux Mint, I know there are methods but with the registration as a hobbyist and using a container… Got too much, you can blame me as a user not being invested enough to get it working, and installed FreeCAD from the Linux store hassle free.
The quirks I can work around, sometimes it makes me go back and redesign another iteration to avoid the quirk and then also improve my design as a bonus
Same for me. I got a 3D printer and was more interested in downloading files than creating my own. But when I got into FreeCAD it opened a world of customisation.
It took me a long time to learn and I’m still learning, like ensuring I’m constraining in a way which allows resizing later on in the design.
I love it. I had learned AutoCAD in college (a while ago) so FreeCAD feels natural enough. I use it for custom-designed 3d prints
The recent v1 updates were a big improvement
For whatever reason I just could not for the life of me get FreeCAD to work at all.
No matter what I wanted to do, it felt like it would always behave in a way I didn’t expect, do nothing at all, not work like it did in tutorials, or flat out make a change that then became impossible to undo, or take me to a menu that I somehow just couldn’t get out of.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I had to literally give up on FreeCAD after spending hours trying and failing to make even the simplest shapes, like a cube with an indent in the middle.
It’s good FreeCAD exists, but it needs a LOT of polish, especially for people who don’t already have experience with tools like Fusion, and only have more rudimentary CAD experience with tools like the ones built into slicers, Tinkercad, or Onshape.
Have you tried it recently? I had good success with their tutorials. Though I sure wasn’t using advanced features. And plugins were hit or miss.
How recently? Last time I tried was early December of 2024 (version 1.0), though I suppose a lot of the tutorials I was watching were probably made on at least 1 version prior based on their release dates.
Maybe it’s just a skill issue on my part 💀
I second this. Version 1.0 was only released a year ago. I gave it another try and was pleasantly surprised!
I am starting to learn FreeCAD for a picture for a research article. I do not want to learn Inventor or any other propertiary software.
I’ve done a fair bit on TinkerCad. How does it compare?
TinkerCad is great to teach CAD, but it suffers on important CAD features for production. It also does not make round cylinders, they are polygons. But, sometimes when modifying another model, I can use TinkerCAD where Fusion360 chokes on too many vertices.
FreeCAD is a parametric modeler, so it’s closer to Inventor, Fusion360 or OnShape than TinkerCAD. FreeCAD is GPL FOSS software, so it was made by programmers for programmers to program on, not for designers to design designs in. For the most part, features aren’t implemented in ways that are useful for the user, they’re implemented in ways that were easy or straightforward for the developers.
No hyperbole, a functioning understanding of Python is almost a prerequisite for getting anything actually done in FreeCAD, because you’ll encounter things like variable scope.
In some ways, I like how FreeCAD handles things better than some other software. FreeCAD has a spreadsheet built in, you can put your dimensions there in one place and then reference them in drawings (again, think Python variable scope. Dimensions.overall_length) and then if you need to make revisions you don’t have to hunt through sketches and shit you just change the parameter. And then watch as the model explodes because they still haven’t solved the topological naming problem.
my usability scale from most user friendly (top) to least (bottom)
- TinkerCad
- Google sketchup
- …
- …
- …
- …
- …
- Autodesk Inventor
- Blender (CAD plugin)
- …
- …
- FreeCAD
SketchUp has been owned by Trimble for over a decade, but I still think of it as Google SketchUp as well.
I love freecad… I’m going to have to agree with your assertion
Will this be suitable to do 2D architecture stuff? I was about to buy Bricscad, how does this compare?
I haven’t used it for that extensively, but it has different “workbenches” for different purposes and I’ve of those is archipack for architecture. If you give it a shot let me know how it goes since I do need to plan out some home reno work myself.
