Faulty Equipment | Hobby CAD shootout
faulty.equipment
A collection of quick reviews of CAD software for the hobbyist. Features free and/or accessible options such as Onshape, FreeCAD and Fusion 360

Hey there! As a 3D printer addict I do a lot of small parts in CAD to print and use around the house. Lately I’ve been exploring all sorts of CAD software since finding out there’s a more around than just Fusion360 and Onshape so I started exploring what’s out there and jotting down my impressions.

Hope this is not spam, just want to help people see what’s around and help them pick!

  • @[email protected]English
    0•1 year ago

    everything will collapse into a giant mess once you try and change/remove an earlier feature

    In my limited experience that’s true in solidworks too, because every feature is built on the last one. So if you want to modify a feature that’s halfway up the hierarchy, you make a new feature to do it instead. That way it doesn’t break the model and you also preserve the design history of the part.

    That’s the accepted and expected behavior, because preserving design history is important.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      I don’t agree with you and this is pretty much frowned upon at the company I work at. As long as you follow good design principles, minor changes to features would trickle down without much issue. Sometimes things indeed break but they shouldn’t be too hard to solve. It’s not a good habit to keep adding, changing and removing bits to the same area with new features as if you are carving a statue; the history will become unmanageable at some point. Especially in a professional setting where someone else might need to work on your design it would make sense to have a logical build up of your model. For a hobbyist this doesn’t matter that much and I can see how your argument for preserving history makes sense to you.

      But an example of my frustration: With most CAD programs, sketches are usually put on faces and if you make a change elsewhere, the sketch will still be attached to that same face. With FreeCad, sketches seem to be assigned to a face number. This means that if you make a change earlier in the model that adds or removes a different face, your sketch will no longer be attached to the same face it was before because it has a different identifier. At least that’s my experience, but maybe I was doing wrong. It’s certainly not as I expected it to work.

      • @callccEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        This is the topological naming problem and should be solved in an upcoming version pretty soon (within a few months hopefully)