[groos]

It's what caused me to move away from FreeCad to OnShape. Never had an issue in OnShape but got hit with it every time in FreeCad. The sad thing is that there was a fork for a long time which had addressed this problem, and added other nice enhancements as well, but they never merged that work. I guess every org has political problems and FreeCad is no exception.

[hommelix]

The wiki page explains that as from Freecad 1.0, the work done by Realthunder in the topological naming problem has been merged into Freecad. Not that everything is solved. Just to mention that the work of Real thunder was not lost.

[groos]

Glad to hear it as I moved away before 1.0 happened. RealThunder had other enhancements as well, if I remember correctly. I wonder if those were taken up as well.

[bombela]

Sadly the fast and smooth renderer wasn't taken. So last I tested, mainline v1.1 is still not able to work with big models. Try loading the full Voron 3D printer step file.

This fast renderer also closes and add hashed faces to cross sections views, instead of showing some buggy view of the inverts faces of the model.

Furthermore, the sketcher since mainline v1 is very laggy. Every click lags because its trying to draw the dimensions while you move them around but it's somehow slow and irritably laggy.

Finally in general, mainline also plenty of weird UI jitter and flicker. As if some code is fighting to resize elements back and forth during use.

Oh and the pie menu also wasn't copied either. On the realthunder fork a double press on "g" brings a menu under the mouse that quickly list the geometry near the cursor sorted by type, highlighting it as you hover on the selection. This is fantastic because of how bad freecad is at guessing what you are trying to select.

But mainline got a new color scheme and torturously slow UI animations that cannot be fully be disabled. This shows where are the priorities in my opinion.

To finish on a note of hope, at least I have noticed more open source projects using freecad rather than proprietary alternatives lately.

[mitthrowaway2]

Realthunder also lets the sketchers use projected geometry as real geometry, rather than only as construction geometry. And automatically creates shapebinders, which is very convenient. I still prefer it, but 1.0 works better with add-on toolboxes like Lattice2.

[MegaDeKay]

The ability to pull in projected geometry as real geometry or construction geometry is in the release candidate for V1.1 that should be released reasonably soon. There's a lot of other cool features in V1.1 as well.

I treat FreeCAD as a rolling release, using the dev version on a decently complex model [0] and it has been a really good experience so far. Lots of useful features and fixees going in all the time.

[0] https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/

[bombela]

Oh yes, which is so useful. I am still using his now outdated fork. Hoping that at some point mainline gets performant enough for me to switch and learn new workarounds to different bugs.

[Robotbeat]

This isn’t accurate. FreeCAD merged the main changes from that fork (RealThunder) to fix (well, mitigate) the problem. That’s the big thing with 1.0.

Although… as others have noted, this is a problem with basically all CAD packages, as on a fundamental level, it depends on user design intent. Just some have enough bandaids that it’s more rare.

[groos]

My statement was accurate as of _when_ I moved away from FreeCad. I'm happy they merged the RealThunder work. But they dilly-dallied for a long time while people were demanding a fix and one was available. Doesn't speak well of their org politics.

[obelisk79]

The org politics (which has actually improved tremendously in the last 3 years), in particular related to realthunder's solution, was related to code compartmentalization and maintainability. Yes realthunder's solution worked, and he submitted massive monolithic PR's to FreeCAD main for integration and then basically disappeared. Ultimately, it ended up getting chunked out into smaller parts and reverse engineered and restructured by a couple of other FreeCAD dev's under grants paid for by FreeCAD and it took them about a year to accomplish. The man who did the bulk of the work, Brad McLean, unfortunately died shortly before 1.0 released with all of his work included in it.

Not trivial work.

[mft_]

I’ve experienced similar problems (not totally sure if they were exactly the “topological naming problem” but certainly similar from the description) in Solidworks many times. Not usually a major problem - just a reworking or removal / re-adding of some features needed.

I’ve not encountered the same issue in FreeCAD 1.1 (to which I’ve transitioned recently). There are of course other frustrating niggles in FreeCAD, but not this one (yet).

[mitthrowaway2]

I had the same experience, but instead of moving away from FreeCAD to OnShape, I moved to the fork that you mentioned, by RealThunder. Works great! Eventually the main branch mostly caught up.

[embedding-shape]

How does OnShape handle that problem? The linked page seems to make the case that most CAD suffers from this, others just "hide" it better;

> This problem is not unique to FreeCAD. It is generally present in CAD software, but most other CAD software has heuristics to reduce the impact of the problem on users.

[throwup238]

Most CAD software have a mapping algorithm that remaps the new features to the old features after a topological restructure using a combination of topological id systems and heuristics.

Solidworks and Onshape don’t “hide” it better, their algorithms are better and break down in much more complex models than FreeCAD. Each one also tends to have its own quirks so as you learn to use the software you get a bit of intuition on how to best model certain features to avoid angering the topological naming gods.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Solidworks break down in a simple model, it’s always been in complex shapes using advanced features.

[DecoPerson]

I think the word “solve” is better than “hide” here.

Fusion 360’s heuristics are so good that I rarely run into these problems. When I do, it’s usually because it was a drastic change to a previous feature in the timeline and I’m expecting to encounter issues because it’s a really fundamental change.

[obelisk79]

that's basically because all commercial cad software are built on the same 3 geometric kernels (none of which are open source) and have robust and mature solutions. FreeCAD's is improving over time but it's a game of catch-up and the math and algorithms involved are complex.

The kernel FreeCAD uses doesn't really have a robust heuristic for this, so FreeCAD had to implement its own.