[Workaccount2]

FreeCAD is probably the single most frustrating and unintuitive pieces of software I have ever used. I almost drafted hate mail to the devs after 15 minutes of crash coursing fusion360 got me further than 2 days of trying to use FreeCAD.

It seems like it has lots of capability but still "punch your monitor" levels of difficulty just trying to do the most basic stuff.

[foofoo12]

I use FreeCAD and it's pretty good. But I think it's impossible to learn by trial and error.

MangoJelly has done an amazing job in churning out high quality tutorials for FreeCAD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yh_S31R9g&list=PLWuyJLVUNt...

(this is just one playlist, there's a lot more on his channel).

[sinker]

Productive FreeCAD user chiming in here. I understand the frustration. It has a moderate learning curve, but the editing model forms an intuitive picture once you learn the basics and start using it.

Also second the MangoJelly tutorials. You will have a much better time if you walk through a few lessons first as opposed to just winging it and expecting to understand how everything works immediately.

[RAMJAC]

While it's a pain to learn and requires some plugins (addons) for basic ergonomics, FreeCAD absolutely works for parametric CAD modeling. YMMV depending on the project and complexity, it does the trick for laser cutting, bending and 3D printing.

Deltahedra is a great YouTube channel for getting the basics.

[VerifiedReports]

It suffers from too many "workbenches," some of which appear to be redundant or dated. You never know whether structures created by one are "compatible" with the M.O. of another (like "Part" vs. "Part Design").

And it presents nonsensical problems, like offering to create a sketch on the face of an object and then complaining that the sketch doesn't belong to any object. So you have to manually drag it under the object in the treeview. So gallingly DUMB.

Despite all that, I will wrestle with its ineptitude before giving Autodesk a penny. I get stuff done with it and respect those who give their time to develop it.

[sinker]

Some of the basics aren't immediately obvious or even hinted at very well for new users, but the "problems" that come up are consistent with its own editing model.

> complaining that the sketch doesn't belong to any object

The sketch is by default attached to the "active body". Active Body is a simple, but important concept to understand. Any operation you do, including adding a sketch, is applied to what is designated as the active body. You designate the active body by right-clicking on the desired body in the object pane.

> It suffers from too many "workbenches"

Another understandably common source of confusion. There's the ever-confusing Part and Part Design workbenches.

I think it's best to just ignore Part and use Part Design whenever possible. Part lets you do operations at a more granular level, but Part Design provides a lot more QOL enhancements and is more intuitive. For the vast majority of things, Part Design is more than capable. I would only use Part workbench when absolutely necessary.

You probably understand all of this already. It's directed more towards the reader. I feel the need to defend FC when certain accusations are brought up. It's immensely powerful, capable, and usable. In my case, I can work very rapidly with it - though it's taken some time to arrive here. The project deserves more than just aspersions.

[VerifiedReports]

Thanks for the reply. I like FC a lot and use it frequently! And yes, I pretty much use Part Design exclusively... except when I'm importing a shape from an SVG. Then I have to use a combination of workbenches.

The combo of tracing a bitmap (from a scanned drawing) with Inkscape and then saving the result as SVG to bring into FreeCAD has been a frequent workflow for me. It generally works very well.

To clarify about the "active body" though: This problem occurs even when there's only one active body and the shape upon which you've supposedly draw the sketch is part of it. So why is FC complaining?

[sinker]

I can't tell for sure without knowing exactly what's happening, but one reason is that if you create a sketch from the Sketcher workbench, it will not be added to the active body.

If you create the sketch from the Part Design workbench, then it will be added to the active body.

A Body is specifically a Part Design concept, and FC doesn't presume you'll be working in PD, so this makes sense in a way - it works on the presumption that the Sketcher workbench works with other workbenches and not just PD specifically.

One thing to note is that creating sketches from Sketcher and PD is different. Sketcher offers attachment options to faces, edges, etc., while PD only offers to attach the sketch to base plane (XY, XZ, or YZ).

There is a good reason for this also. The reason is that in designing parts, especially complex parts, it is highly discouraged to use faces or edges (i.e., features) as attachment points because it makes your model very brittle against changes.

This is more of a general CAD philosophy than a FC thing. It's better to set where a sketch attaches based on variable values. For example, if you have a cylinder with a height 20 and you want to attach a box to the top of the cylinder - rather than attaching to the top face of the cylinder, it's better to create a variable h=20, and set the cylinder to height h, and set the box's z-value also to h.

In FC, I use VarSets for this. I used to use the Spreadsheet workbench, but found it clumsy.

[VerifiedReports]

Thanks, that's useful info and something I've wondered about.

Your comment also serves as an excellent illustration of what's "wrong" with FreeCAD, though.

"One thing to note is that creating sketches from Sketcher and PD is different. Sketcher offers attachment options to faces, edges, etc., while PD only offers to attach the sketch to base plane (XY, XZ, or YZ)."

OK, but I would argue that sketching functionality should still be centralized. So if you have a body or some appropriate object selected and invoke the sketcher (or vice versa), attachment to faces, edges, etc. will be enabled. Otherwise it's disabled.

That's standard GUI, and it's well-understood that greying something out tells the user that some condition isn't met. But he still learns that the option exists and where it resides.

"In FC, I use VarSets for this. I used to use the Spreadsheet workbench, but found it clumsy."

Thanks for the tip. I've been meaning to tackle spreadsheets as a means to resize stuff (another pain point with seemingly many "solutions" in FreeCAD).

[nickthegreek]

how long ago did you try? the recent advances have turned me into a believer as a hobbyist compared to the first time i checked it out.

[Klaster_1]

Not OP, but I've been using FreeCAD for hobby projects for 8 years and even though I usually do achieve the results I want, the "monitor punching UX issues" are absolutely real. I'd love for FreeCAD to succeed the way Blender did, but the project either lacks people with UX expertise or funds to sponsor such people.

[SchemaLoad]

I tried it this year. Not in too much depth, but I tried Fusion and FreeCAD for the first time this year for 3D printing and found I was getting much further much faster on Fusion.

I'm sure I could grind harder and learn more and make FreeCAD work, but I'm not sure why I'd bother.

[nirvdrum]

If all you're looking to do is produce a design the quickest way possible, then sure Fusion often wins. Just as there was a time where buying Maya made more sense than using Blender. But, FreeCAD offers other niceties, like being able to work offline, using an open file format, performant non-web UI, generally avoiding vendor lock-in. And Autodesk already did a major rug pull with Fusion360 licensing once.

I mostly design functional 3D prints. I've found FreeCAD 1.0 fixed most of the annoyances I ran into and I'm pretty productive with it. But, I didn't come into it with an expectation of a SolidWorks or Fusion clone. I learned the tool with its own idioms and it seems pretty straightforward to me. It's not perfect by any means and I've run into the occasional bug. To that end, I've found reporting bugs with reproducible steps goes a long way to getting things fixed.

I'm not sure what it is about CAD in particular, but I find everyone wants the "Blender of the CAD world" while skipping over the decade of investment it took to get Blender where it is. For a long time, discussions about Blender were dominated by complaints about the UX. If we didn't have folks willing to work past a hit to productivity in order to make an investment into Blender, we wouldn't have the amazing open source tool we have today. FreeCAD has all the expectations of a high quality open source CAD tool with hardly any of the investment. Just getting people on /r/freecad to file issues is surprisingly challenging.

By all means, if you're happy with Fusion and don't mind the licensing, have at it. I'm sure there's functionality in there without an equivalent in FreeCAD. I'd personally rather not have my designs locked up in Fusion and see FreeCAD as the best option for me, even if it suffers from the challenges of open source UI design.

[nickthegreek]

No arguement that fusion isn’t better and easier to learn. Their licensing and changes to their hobbyist offering were no longer tenable for me which prompted my change. I was pleasantly surprised at how well I was able to work in freecad after a few youtube videos.