[1220512064]

IDK how they compare to professional CAD tools, but I've heard good things about FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. I know that some people use Blender for CAD work, and there are even some extensions to make it easier, but I'm dubious that the representation of meshes that Blender uses are well-suited for CAD applications.

[al_borland]

I just tried FreeCAD last week. I uninstalled it after about 10 minutes. The most basic actions to just get started were throwing errors. Maybe it was user error, but it was a very bad first impression.

[fxff]

Approached it with the same attitude at the same time, after 10 minutes decided to view some basic tutorial (for an earlier release) that made things clear and I could continue basic tinkering on my own.

But of course built-in intro of Solidworks was a way better UX.

[sinker]

Sorry about the bad experience. If you decide to give it another try, it's worth spending a few hours on some intro tutorials first. I recommend MangoJelly on youtube.

FC is not a program you can just open and start using, especially if you have zero experience with parametric modeling.

If you're serious about design, modeling, engineering, etc., and want to own your own data, it's worth investing the hours to learn it starting from the very basics.

[mitthrowaway2]

Do you mind sharing what you were trying to do? I love FreeCAD so I'd be happy to help you do it if you'd be willing to give it a second try.

[al_borland]

My main goal is to reproduce the floor plan of my house, so I can figure out how to best layout the furniture.

[mitthrowaway2]

I actually did the same thing so that I could figure out how to lay out my workshop!

What I'd do is:

- Spreadsheet workbench --> Create spreadsheet (name it "measurements"). (This is optional)

- Switch to Part design workbench --> Create body (name it "layout") --> select XY plane --> Create sketch --> Create Polyline

- Zoom out, start drawing the rooms in your house, approximately to scale.

- Before going into too much detail, add a dimension (select line --> "Constrain Distance") to the first line you draw, so that you can do the rest of your drawing approximately to scale. Then the general shape won't get messed up when you add dimensions to everything else.

- (If you have a photo or picture, you can import that to sketch over).

- Add constraints to match your room measurements, mostly vertical or horizontal distance constraints. Be careful not to overconstrain the sketch. (You can put the measurements directly into the sketch constraints, or you can put them into the top-level spreadsheet, create an alias for each cells, and then set the dimensions to reference those cells).

- Once the rooms are drawn, close the sketch and create a new sketch on the xy plane called "furniture".

- Draw some rectangles for your sofas / tables / etc, delete any horizontal and vertical constraints that get automatically added (they look like little | and _ icons), and instead apply perpendicularity constraints. Dimension your rectangles using only the "constrain distance" tool. Now you can drag them around the room and rotate them freely.

- If you want to make 3D models for these too, create new Part Design bodies for each room and each piece of furniture, create a shape binder referencing the master sketches in the Layout body, and then extrude the sketches using the "Pad" operation.

That's about as much tutorial as it makes sense to pack into a HN comment. If you give it a try, I hope it works out for you!

[al_borland]

Thanks! I’ll save this and give it a shot soon.

[rabf]

There are excellent tutorials on youtube. Spending a couple of hours doing these will allow you to hit the ground running.

FreeCad is rapidly evolving and quite a few tutorials are already using the v1.1 dev builds. Pay attention to the version used in tutorials as you can run into trouble following them if you are on an older release.

[thyristan]

There is a blender addon called Bonsai for this:

https://bonsaibim.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXRpDka6gLI

Strong plus is that you can render views of the finished room in Blender. Big problem is that you first have to learn to use Blender.

[tlamponi]

For that purpose Sweet Home 3D might be easier to use, especially if one has not that much CAD experience.

https://www.sweethome3d.com/

[al_borland]

I’ll take a look. I’ve used some of those purpose built tools before and I was never much of a fan. Usually due to how the furniture was handled.

Back in high school I had extensive experience with AutoCAD R14 (3 years with it, after 2 years of board drafting), and then in college I had some more experience with a couple other packages. But this was all a couple decades ago now.

[tlamponi]

Your CAD experience level sounds like it is similar, but a bit higher than mine (2 years hand drawing, 2 years CAD, some more hobbyistic CAD & 3D modelling over the years for personal projects), so yeah SweetHome3D might not be that much help for you over using some CAD software directly.

I found furniture handling OK, but certainly has its rough edges. Good thing is that one can just import 3d models and so create the relevant pieces of furniture themselves; or use the generic boxes that SH3D has, if it's just for 2d space usage.

I did a few office space modellings with it, i.e. to get a feeling of how the space could be used best, and for that I found it quite OK. The result I got compared to the time invested was pretty good for my taste.

[jazzyjackson]

I like using paper and cardboard for this, dollhouse style, much easier to move things around and visualize that way and more fun than clicking a mouse to boot :^)

Inkscape is good for typing dimensions into rectangles tho

[al_borland]

This was my plan B. I do have a scale I can use for it.

I’ll check out Inkscape as well. I’ve tried using some raster graphics in the past, but I couldn’t type dimensions and had to use the rules and guides with snapping. It mostly worked, but was a bit annoying.

[mkl]

I would say Inkscape is way better for that.

[mclau153]

if you try OnShape you will probably be much better off

[Fabricio20]

I tried FreeCAD and the user interface is so unintuitive and things just have constraints that block you from doing the most basic things from the get-go that I just gave up in 10m, like sibling. SCAD is scripted/programmer CAD, I like the concept and have used for a few things but it's quite a learning curve to do anything more than a cube with some funny edges! Dune3D is currently my go-to for 3d-printer related parts!

[entrox]

FreeCAD is definitely not something you can just pick up, but it's pretty intuitive if you're coming from CATIA as the workflow is very similar.

[nirvdrum]

Have you tried since the 1.0 release? There were quite a few improvements that were locked behind weekly builds for a long time. AstoCAD[1] might be another option for you. It's basically FreeCAD with a streamlined UI.

[1] -- https://www.astocad.com/

[MattRix]

OpenSCAD is great, I’ve made some very complex stuff in it that would be hard to make even in professional tools like Fusion. For some reason the main OpenSCAD releases don’t seem to get updated (the current version on the site is 2021.x). The nightly builds are great though, and I recommend getting one and turning on the Manifold backend since it is MUCH faster than the default CGAL one.

[WillAdams]

There is also:

https://pythonscad.org/

[the__alchemist]

I will phrase my response in an alternative form which, I mean not in a flippant way, but because I think it will clarify this, in complement to the other replies:

> Mom, may we have SolidWorks?

> We have SolidWorks at Home.

> <SolidWorks at Home>

This is in contrasti to the example the parent comment brought up, and the one I added: Blender and KiCad do not have this concern; there are free (Or you could say inexpensive) high quality tools in their spaces. This is notably not the case for traditional CAD.