Dumb cloud-only stuff. Good that I use Onshape, where stuff like that could never happen!
…wait a minute, shit. It absolutely could and probably will.
The owners certainly could restrict the free tier or ban my account if they want, and then everything is gone.
I absolutely hate that. I really like Onshape, because it works great, but we NEED an, at least decent, FOSS option.
I don’t necessarily need stuff like flow simulations, just good modeling, like in F360 or Onshape.
FreeCAD didn’t work too for me. The UI was horrible, the workflow very unintuitive and wonky, and it crashed a lot, while not supporting basic functions.
There were a few alternatives around too, but they were in the very alpha stage and didn’t work yet at the time I researched.
I really wish someone would create something from scratch, or fork something that already works, like Blender, and turns it into a CAD.
It’s just sad to know all my hundreds of models in Onshape will get useless some time in the future.
Realthunder has been working with the main team to get his toponaming fix into mainline FreeCAD, and they’ve already adopted several of his UI improvements and settled on an assembly workbench. Version 1.0 should finally be released by the end of the year, and the weekly builds are promising. I don’t know if it’s quite there for me yet, but I’m hoping it will be by the time my paid-for Alibre is feeling long in the tooth, and any CAD DIY enthusiast would be wise to keep half an eye on FreeCAD.
Seriously give Ondsel a try if you haven’t, has a different ui on top of freecad and a few workflow changes/sketch tools that make it less clunky. I use realthunder + modern ui for freecad and while yeah, there’s clunk, it’s useable and importantly, no limits on your files. Modern UI gives freecad a ribbon bar and some other enhancements that I like, swapping between benches took a bit to get used to, draft at least the hotkeys are kinda sorta intuitive and make the flow a lot nicer.
I switched cold turkey off of SW Maker for that reason, it limits where your files can be opened on that license, plus kept trying to save my files to a cloud storage by default. I’ve said it before, yeah freecad isn’t perfect, has clunk, but it’s provided to me free of charge with no limitations on its usage, I’ll gladly accept that.
That sucks! Seems to work on my oldish laptop, can’t recall if I used on my really old one too but they both have 16gb of ram and running an appimage on Debian for those, windows seems to be happy with it. Running the python 3.11 versions as well, idk if that makes a difference
Fair enough, visually the ModernUI made it similar to what I was used to, I pretty much bounce between part design, sketch and assembly workbenches for everything I do, been a bit but I think ondsel swaps automatically to sketch from part workbench and the dimension tool is way nicer, general freecad doesn’t really have that smart dim tool, but the keyboard shortcuts make it better.
Workflow wise, I found it pretty much exactly the same as I used SW and other parametric cad packages, make your sketches, extrude your base and then build sketches for other features. Toponaming fix seems to make external geometry references a bit more reliable, have a few cleanups if I change way back in the tree, not all sunshine and rainbows though, definitely had some frustrations and clunk. What’s sold me honestly is I dove in with a largish project (more than I expected tbh, I’ll post it when it’s more mature) and it’s so far totally met my needs.
Dumb cloud-only stuff. Good that I use Onshape, where stuff like that could never happen!
…wait a minute, shit. It absolutely could and probably will. The owners certainly could restrict the free tier or ban my account if they want, and then everything is gone.
I absolutely hate that. I really like Onshape, because it works great, but we NEED an, at least decent, FOSS option. I don’t necessarily need stuff like flow simulations, just good modeling, like in F360 or Onshape.
FreeCAD didn’t work too for me. The UI was horrible, the workflow very unintuitive and wonky, and it crashed a lot, while not supporting basic functions.
There were a few alternatives around too, but they were in the very alpha stage and didn’t work yet at the time I researched.
I really wish someone would create something from scratch, or fork something that already works, like Blender, and turns it into a CAD.
It’s just sad to know all my hundreds of models in Onshape will get useless some time in the future.
There is cad plugins for blender. That said try FreeCAD again with the next major release. From the looks of FreeCAD daily, it’s really improved
Freecad link branch ?
Realthunder has been working with the main team to get his toponaming fix into mainline FreeCAD, and they’ve already adopted several of his UI improvements and settled on an assembly workbench. Version 1.0 should finally be released by the end of the year, and the weekly builds are promising. I don’t know if it’s quite there for me yet, but I’m hoping it will be by the time my paid-for Alibre is feeling long in the tooth, and any CAD DIY enthusiast would be wise to keep half an eye on FreeCAD.
Seriously give Ondsel a try if you haven’t, has a different ui on top of freecad and a few workflow changes/sketch tools that make it less clunky. I use realthunder + modern ui for freecad and while yeah, there’s clunk, it’s useable and importantly, no limits on your files. Modern UI gives freecad a ribbon bar and some other enhancements that I like, swapping between benches took a bit to get used to, draft at least the hotkeys are kinda sorta intuitive and make the flow a lot nicer.
I switched cold turkey off of SW Maker for that reason, it limits where your files can be opened on that license, plus kept trying to save my files to a cloud storage by default. I’ve said it before, yeah freecad isn’t perfect, has clunk, but it’s provided to me free of charge with no limitations on its usage, I’ll gladly accept that.
Modern ui ?
It’s an add-on ModernUI I really like it, configurable as well, mainly use for ribbon bar and dockable panels
from the github, I use small icons with no labels (like the window in the middle), works well for me on an ultrawide.
I didn’t know about this. Thank you !
I’ve tried the modern UI plugin, it makes freecad crash every 15min or so on my computer.
ModernUI was abandoned afik. FreeCAD Ribbon UI seems to have taken its place.
https://github.com/geolta/FreeCAD-Ribbon
That sucks! Seems to work on my oldish laptop, can’t recall if I used on my really old one too but they both have 16gb of ram and running an appimage on Debian for those, windows seems to be happy with it. Running the python 3.11 versions as well, idk if that makes a difference
It doesn’t really have a major impact on the workflow from what I’ve tried, it’s still the shitty workflow of regular freecad.
Fair enough, visually the ModernUI made it similar to what I was used to, I pretty much bounce between part design, sketch and assembly workbenches for everything I do, been a bit but I think ondsel swaps automatically to sketch from part workbench and the dimension tool is way nicer, general freecad doesn’t really have that smart dim tool, but the keyboard shortcuts make it better.
Workflow wise, I found it pretty much exactly the same as I used SW and other parametric cad packages, make your sketches, extrude your base and then build sketches for other features. Toponaming fix seems to make external geometry references a bit more reliable, have a few cleanups if I change way back in the tree, not all sunshine and rainbows though, definitely had some frustrations and clunk. What’s sold me honestly is I dove in with a largish project (more than I expected tbh, I’ll post it when it’s more mature) and it’s so far totally met my needs.