[smcleod]

Interesting! In the 3D printing community we badly need more options for CAD/model design. The current options are slow and expensive, some are windows only - almost all of them have a non-linear learning curve for relatively simple things.

[ranting-moth]

FreeCAD's arch nemesis has been lack of good educational material, until very recently.

Checkout MangoJelly's "FreeCAD 0.20 For Beginners Tutorials" and follow along. It will change your life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXN7TOg3kj4&list=PLWuyJLVUNt...

[bschwindHN]

Its arch nemesis is also its intimidating and messy UI.

I noped out of FreeCAD in the first minute after I downloaded it and tried it. I'll open it again right now and record my thoughts:

I open up FreeCAD and am immediately annoyed. A splash page takes multiple seconds on an M1 Pro, and then I'm dumped into a empty page with a mess of buttons around it.

Why are there browser UI elements and buttons for "set URL" and "open website"?

I click around and realize there are different "workbenches" which are different UIs for making different types of parts. The UI feels sluggish, and it's hard to tell whether a button is disabled or not. Clicking any button seems to take hundreds of milliseconds to respond.

I go into the Drawing workbench to attempt to make something. There are two buttons with identical iconography (a piece of paper with a shiny light on the top right). One means "new empty document" (what is a document?), and the other is... Open SVG (?)

Right now I am just attempting to draw a sketch or _something_ like that. I guess Drawing wasn't the right workbench. Moving to "part design" now.

Ahh, finally the combination of "create new document" and then "create body", then "create sketch", then "select workplane" _finally_ puts me in a view to start creating something. I am assaulted with what seems to be around 30 new buttons with unintuitive icons which I need to hover over to decipher their meaning (at least they have hovertext!)

The rendering window at this point is quite tiny compared to my screen, and it's rendering at what seems to be around 30 FPS on a 120 Hz display.

I saved my project to a file, and it dumps out some binary thing. Good luck with version control on that I guess.

I'll stop here, but overall FreeCAD just feels gross to use, and it needs a lot more than just tutorials to increase its usage.

Compare to SolveSpace, which loads instantly, puts you immediately into a mode where you can start creating, renders at my screen refresh rate, and doesn't overwhelm me with UI elements I don't need until I'm actually doing something related to them. I know SolveSpace has way less features compared to FreeCAD, and it also has its confusing moments as well, but it actually has decent taste in its UI and UX, and runs very responsively (as all applications should with the kinds of computers we have these days).

[zokier]

> I know SolveSpace has way less features compared to FreeCAD

At least SolveSpace has assemblies. FreeCAD has four different community plugins which all are wonky in their own ways.

I don't know if I'm just weird, but to me assembly is kinda fundamental feature of CAD. I mean you'd think your basic workflow is to design some parts and then see if they actually fit together, but apparently that sort of thing is not what FreeCAD is for.

[eternityforest]

Assembly3 workbench in the Realthunder fork seems like it will likely become the standard.

[eternityforest]

I'm just happy to have CAD at all. My point of reference is pencil and paper, Blender, or OpenSCAD. It could use some improvements, but by FOSS standards it's amazing.

You actually can save to kinda VCSable folders of XML, but it will spam the history with UI changes mixed in with actual changes.

[porker]

Your experience of FreeCAD is similar to my experience opening SketchUp on MacOS 2 weeks ago. Apparently it's designed for a 3 button mouse, it really doesn't lend itself to trackpad usage. And the UI and iconography... yes. Confusing as **.

[ranting-moth]

Yes, FreeCAD badly needs a UI/UX overhaul.

But even then, any advanced CAD software is not the type of soft software that you can open and "figure out".

[readerbaza]

FreeCAD is a textbook example of an UI/UX "designed" by programmers. Nothing works as expected. The underlying programming model leaks out way too much. The fact that it's buggy doesn't help. And critical functionality (assemblies?) is not supported by the core team.

I'm learning it because on linux desktop there's not much else but it's a joke for professionals.

[smcleod]

Thanks for the recommendation I'll check it out.

Personally, I've always found free cared to be very unintuitive - the whole UI/UX feels hostel to the user.

[phkahler]

Which things have you tried?

[smcleod]

Fusion 360, AutoCAD, FreeCAD, Shapr3d, Blender (w/ a bunch of addons to add some CAD like functionality), Meshlab, Plasticity.

[pehtis]

I would highly recommend moi3D.com. Its ‘only’ a NURBS modeler but I’ve successfully used from initial concept design all the way to DFM. Its user interface is extremely well thought out and its written by Michael Gibson who is also the original developer of Rhino3D.

[smcleod]

$450AUD for a single user personal / non-commercial license for v4?!? That's.... insane!

[sgtnoodle]

My go-tos are OpenSCAD and the online version of SketchUp.

[jacquesm]

Sketchup online is so frustrating and tedious. Even the most basic stuff like chamfering an edge requires all kinds of workarounds.

[injidup]

Onshape Browser based CAD is free for open source models.

[smcleod]

I have tried Onshape but I'm a big fan of browser based apps and I don't always have an internet connection when I want to create.