FreeCAD
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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I use FreeCAD and Assembly3 for everything and have for many years now. I sometimes use realthunder's fork of FreeCAD but right now it's quite a bit behind upstream and there are some cool new features in sketcher so I use upstream for those.
Some people get confused about workflow in FreeCAD because there are so many options and every youtube video has different opinions or tries to feature a particular workbench like curves or something. My opinion.... Pretty much your workflow starting out should be to ignore everything else and use part design and sketches, it's the simplest way:
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enable autosave with a short interval, like 2min
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Switch to part design workbench
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create body
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create sketches as the base of the features of your part attached to the xy, xz, yz planes, offset them to create a "wire frame" that resembles your project
a. Your sketches should be fully constrained
b. Your sketches should have as little geometry in them as possible, if you need more complex stuff make more sketches
c. Your sketches should have closed wires, you can't pad something that doesn't create a face.
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use pad, pocket, revolution, loft, and hole operations on those sketches to form a 3d solid
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if you need to create additional sketches which import geometry from the previous operations (using the external geometry tool), import SKETCH geometry from the previous ops, not edges of solids, whenever possible. Hide your solid, unhide your sketch, select that with the external geometry tool.
a. Use sketch on face sparingly.
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Do fillets and chamfers last, if you need to change something, delete them and recreate them once you've made your changes.
To make multiple parts make multiple bodies with the same workflow as above.
Once you get pretty good at making static parts with constrained geometry, holes, threads (with the hole function), etc, which you can do with only the stuff above, then you can branch out into other workbenches like assemblies or curves, but all of those things build on the concepts above, so it's easy to get overwhelmed if you try to do it all right from the start. Learning how to recover from a mistake is just part of CAD in general, though I admit that it's a bit more effort to find what's wrong in FC vs commercial platforms, but we aren't here, on lemmy, in a linux community, to use commercial platforms.
AFAIK that's pretty much the same workflow as F360 uses for single-solid parts though things have different names. pad=extrude for example.
It's obviously far from perfect but in my opinion it's the best solution that runs natively on Linux and is actually open source. Also assembly3 uses solvespace as it's backend solver so if you make assemblies using that you are kindof using solvespace too.
Also, I hear/read a lot of complaining about instability but I've honestly never had a crash that wasn't on an experimental branch like RT or the edge release of upstream. However step 0 above should help if you're worried about that.
Sadly, I couldn't fine even one that was at least usable in my experience.
I model a lot for 3D-printing, and of course tried FreeCAD.
It had a very steep learning curve and is very unique in its workflow, compared to other CADs.
I somehow got the hang of it, but it still was very much not usable.
It crashed every 5 minutes, the UI is very convoluted, and even the simplest tasks take half an hour, compared to the 2 minutes it takes on other software.
Since Fusion360 doesn't work on Linux, there's pretty much only Onshape.
Apart from being a SaaS-product ("cloud based"), and therefore out of your control, which I strongly dislike, it's absolutely great UX wise.
But good news, there are people working on a solution. I will add the name of the project later if I can remember it again.
Edit: found it: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d
There are also people forking the engine and some core features of FreeCAD and want to turn it into something better, but I don't know if they've made something out of that idea yet.
I personally never had a problem with Free cad. It's the only cad software I ever used, so I can't compare it to others but it just worked after I learned some basics.
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What linux were you using if you don't mind asking?
At this time Fedora. I used both the Flatpak and native package, but both were very prone to crashes.
I used it for some time too on Windows, same problem. It isn't a Linux issue, it's a FreeCAD issue. It's too convoluted and bloated, while probably not having enough maintainers.
You should try arch or an arch fork, arch doesn't leave broken upstream pkgs unpatched too long, either they work or they are out
I am already.
While I don't plan to use FreeCAD in the near future, I already use Arch in Distrobox on Fedora Atomic. I quite like it, but still mostly refer to Flatpaks first when possible, since they have a lot of users and are better sandboxed.
But good news, there are people working on a solution. I will add the name of the project later if I can remember it again.
Im definitely interested as well, we got plasticity I suppose, but that doesn't have a timeline and is missing a lot of more advanced features
I added the link into my original comment for you :)
Thanks! That's awesome, I'll check it out. Hopefully it will one day be able to match more professional software in terms of functionality and stability
Depends on what your using it for? For 3d printers I like FreeCAD. Though it has a bit of an initial learning curve. It has a lot of functionally. SolveSpace was pretty good but I had some trouble with fillets and things. Might have been user errors... I havent used blender much but heard its good for more artistic modeling for games and videos. Not sure if it would work good for 3d parts? Anyone use it for that?
Artistic modelling i use Blender but Parametric modelling I used FreeCAD.
Despite having worked with CAD software, both were a little hard to wrap my head around initially, but I watched like 2 hours of video tutorials each and I figured it out enough for my needs.
I'm using freecad exclusively and got everything I need to quickly model something for 3D-Printing.
One that hasn't been named yet is SolveSpace. There is also CAD sketcher, a free CAD add-on for Blender
I'm a music lover so im a bit bias but I think its the gnomes projects lollipop its a gtk (go figure) music playet
Funny response ngl.