I hope to have one of these articles about FreeCAD one day. Maybe the stakes are lower for movies than engineering and that's why it hasn't happened yet.
Some blockers I've encountered after spending a lot of time in FreeCAD:
- No built-in assembly workbench. If you create more than 1 object, there is no way to align/attach them together. There are several competing, incompatible, and buggy plugins.
- Topological naming problem is way worse than in paid CAD software. It's very difficult to edit old constraints without breaking new actions as they're replayed: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Topological_naming_problem
- Software dependencies are not included. Essential features like viewing the dependency graph (to unbreak your model; See above) are broken out of the box. You have to manually install specific versions of tools like graphviz (no, not the same version used by all the other software on your system) to unbreak these features first. Same goes for rendering images, exporting to some formats, using some mesh generators, etc. You really get the full "linux desktop" experience even if you are not on linux ;)
> Topological naming problem is way worse than in paid CAD software. It's very difficult to edit old constraints without breaking new actions as they're replayed: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Topological_naming_problem
This is the single, number one, absolute must fix problem in FreeCAD. All other FreeCAD work should stop until this gets fixed. Period.
Broken constraints were bad enough, but as an amateur I could live with them. However, every now and then the system would renumber and reconnect constraints wrongly. That's just not acceptable and should never happen.
Until FreeCAD fixes this not only can't I recommend it but I have to give anti-recommendations to stay far, far away from it. That pains me greatly as FreeCAD is the only piece of open-source software I have ever had to chase people away from.
I agree that this is the biggest blocker, though I wouldn't go so far as to say stay away from it. Rather it is one of the most important things one needs to understand (trust me, you will after you've run into it a few times) when using this tool and design around it. Unfortunately, this limitation renders the tool far less powerful than it could be otherwise.
> All other FreeCAD work should stop until this gets fixed. Period.
Ha ha that's exactly what would happen if FreeCAD was a company and had a product manager, but it's very unlikely that would happen organically.
Maybe some day a megacorp will get so pissed off by solidworks licensing that they fork FreeCAD, rewrite opencascade, fix the high priority bugs, and release code+binaries out of spite. A man can dream.
> Maybe the stakes are lower for movies than engineering and that’s why it hasn’t happened yet.
I really doubt that has much to do with it. The Blender team has been working the hardest on creating sustainable funding, that is the major difference. Blender’s “Get Involved” link takes you to the Blender Foundation page, which is a business entity setup and devoted to funding Blender. FreeCAD’s “Get Involved” link takes you to GitHub. The Blender site lists paid jobs, and has a one-click donate button highlighted with monthly corporate level sponsorships listed, where FreeCAD’s has only a single $5 suggestion behind a menu. There’s a further link to a list on a wiki of a couple more ways to sponsor FreeCAD, but you can feel the difference in scale just browsing the two sites. Blender got started ~8 years ahead of FreeCAD, so yeah maybe if FreeCAD focuses on growing a business model they can get there too. The Blender Foundation was launched about 20 years ago though, and it seems like it look a looong time to get the real traction they seem to have now.
I spent a solid month trying to switch from Fusion 360 to FreeCAD (as a hobbyist maker) and while I got to the point where I could pretty much make anything I needed… it never stopped being a struggle, and taking twice as long.
I really really want an OSS alternative to Fusion/etc but FreeCAD needs a lot of work before it’ll even come close.
I can't thinking that the struggles of an experienced Fusion 360 user such as yourself would be a very valuable thing to contribute to the FreeCAD project.
It's only a few years since we used to hear regular reports of people really struggling with the Blender UI too. It's great to see the improvements to Blender now paying off.
I think there's a fairly good chance that the devs aren't aware of all the rough edges or quirky choices in the same way that a power user of another CAD system would be.
(My own personal CAD experience is so dated at this point as to be pretty useless. I learnt on Unigraphics on a Sun workstation way back in the mists of time but have forget almost everything about it.)
Agreed, FreeCAD is painful to use when you’ve been spoiled by Fusion or OnShape. I’ve tried using SALOME as an OSS alternative, it’s somewhat reminiscent of FreeCAD but something of an improvement. CadQuery is another possibility, but I would miss some of the drawing tools - full parametric CAD seems too limiting.
FreeCAD's user experience is incoherent or perhaps more like chaotic for a newcomer - to FreeCAD, but experienced in CAD -. Like there was no coherent way of thinking or common approaches in it, like if hundreds of people added pieces to it here and there the way they pleased.
At least this is what I seen 5-7 years ago, gave up very quickly struggling with it - a software supposed to make things easier, not more complex, and FreeCAD made things unnecessarily difficult and complicated. Maybe I should look at it again now, hopefully things improved.
I’ve been trying to get to grips with FreeCAD for a few months and it reminds me a lot of pre-2.8 Blender - the UX is very opinionated and clunky, needs some serious re-thinking…
(I am trying to avoid using Fusion 360, which has a much more streamlined experience)
Especially because FreeCAD is a reasonably good cross-platform desktop application, and rebuilding a CAD program from scratch tends to be interpreted as “let’s build a half-assed web service/Electron app” these days.
I agree the FreeCAD UX could use some improvements, but I think even more important would be improving reliability and feature coverage in the OpenCascade CAD geometry library it uses. Slightly more complex things like fillets, lofts, nurbs surfaces are very limited and unreliable today. Mixing any of these with booleans tends to create more trouble.
Blender on the other hand is very solid in the modeling department, in my experience. The mesh based approach certainly helps, but not depending on an external organization for the core geometry functionality does not hurt either.
>> but I think even more important would be improving reliability and feature coverage in the OpenCascade CAD geometry library it uses
I've been wondering what portion of the FreeCAD "problems" people report are actually issues with OpenCascade. I don't have time to deal with any of it, just a question that pops into my head when I see complaints about FreeCAD. When I have time I spend it in Solvespace, which is decades behind commercial CAD but is so much more fun.
Completely agree with this, OpenCascade is just not a good enough foundation to build a CAD package at the same level as SolidWorks or Fusion360. The unfortunate thing is that the level of investment to build a kernel of that quality is in the 10s or millions dollars. Without a corporate backer who wants it, it won't happen.
The only way I could see it happening is if a consortium of large companies decided that they wanted to drop the big players and build an open source one. It needs a visionary in the position to decide to do it.
I've been using various CAD programs, and IMO, FreeCAD UI/UX is quite ok. If you are Inventor or Solidworks user and try to switch to SolidEdge for example, it won't be easy. Not to mention some others like VariCAD (~30 years old professional MCAD)
There are many issues with FreeCAD being OSS alternative to professional MCAD software, but UI/UX is not one of them
- No built-in assembly workbench. If you create more than 1 object, there is no way to align/attach them together. There are several competing, incompatible, and buggy plugins.
- Topological naming problem is way worse than in paid CAD software. It's very difficult to edit old constraints without breaking new actions as they're replayed: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Topological_naming_problem
- Software dependencies are not included. Essential features like viewing the dependency graph (to unbreak your model; See above) are broken out of the box. You have to manually install specific versions of tools like graphviz (no, not the same version used by all the other software on your system) to unbreak these features first. Same goes for rendering images, exporting to some formats, using some mesh generators, etc. You really get the full "linux desktop" experience even if you are not on linux ;)