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Got this email from Autodesk that Fusion is increasing their annual price by a huge amount. I subbed for 1 year a couple years ago for I think $380. Then I was able to get an educational sub after that. Fusion is still the cheapest CAD software out there, not including the free stuff like FreeCAD, but still, this price increase is massive.
It should be noted that it's still free to use for personal use minus the extra features.
The problem is that there is no real competitor to fusion. If you think about usability/learning curve
Onshape has replaced fusion for me, was an easy switch.
I find Onshape to be much better than fusion.
Isn’t onshape for non-commercial only?
Non-commercial is the free version, with all your parts public.
They also have a pro license with a fee, where your parts are then private obviously.
The pro license is like $2000 per year.
So TheDuckPrince was right all along.
Ya TheDuckPrince clearly didnt look very hard for competitors, onshape is great.
If on shape had built in CAM like fusion does, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
SolidWorks for Makers seems like a decent competitor. $48/year USD for now.
I thought they got rid of that tier. Might have to try it out if it's still available.
Seems to still be offered, the license allows up to $2000 profit as well instead of $1000 revenue with fusion.
Nice, someone commented veteran pricing that's $20 a year, which I qualify for, so definitely going to try it out. Thanks!
That's a more reasonable threshold, and allows some wiggle room if you have an idea that blows up and makes you a few bucks (what is profit? Can you count your PC and printer as capital expenditures? etc etc).
Autodesk is gonna Autodesk, but they should, at a minimum, match that term.
Yeah, I've used multiple CAD tools, from pro/engineer to F360, but the learning curve of freecad felt like a brick wall.
FreeCAD definitely has a steeper learning curve and a few rough edges, but to me it was absolutely worth it to learn. I really don't like my files subject to the whims of Autodesk.
Yeah, I've done some editing in FreeCAD, but I'm lost at the rest.
~~I got stuck on googling how to make a fillet in freecad, to which the answer appeared to be, "yeah, nah, you sort of can't". Oh okay, this program is not for me.~~
~~Edit: if people want to help/criticise, I recall the problem was that I couldn't do it parametrically, which is the only way I like to model any engineering parts. So far the only thing that information has gotten me is a downvote. If freecad is as full featured as you say, then this should be easy to do. Feel free to tell me how.~~
EDIT 2: after the info I got, I looked into it more and discovered my problem was a bit different - I couldn't do a parametric offset line in a sketch, because I needed to make a particular pattern. I ended up doing it with OpenSCAD if I recall. I apologise for saying freecad couldn't do fillets, that would've been extremely basic. It was still a very painful experience just to figure out that it couldn't do what I needed.
whens the last time you used freecad? theres literally a button for making fillets.
For years, in fact.
I honestly forget, it was such a terrible experience I didn't give it any more time. I think that the problem was that I couldn't make it parametric.
I tried using Freecad as to filet something recently and it told me to look at the error console for more information, after googling for where the error console is, I realized the message to look at the error console was being output to the error console.
There was no more information to be had. It is a UX and functional nightmare, and it is what it is, but the downside is this means millions of engineers are being trained on subscription web sites, and eventually this will be used to both squeeze people for money, and also to prevent people from creating unauthorized or patented parts.
the fillet button 🤯
Exactly the words that I had come to mind lol
Huh, I've definitely done fillets before. Though they're more nuanced than F3D or SW or ProE.
I've found freecad to be feature complete and fairly performant as a pure CAD tool, but the workflows take getting used to and there are some rough edges where things are just significantly more complex than in competing commercial software.
I think SolveSpace and OpenSCAD have trouble with fillets, but FreeCAD should be fine, though as a person with a non-technical background, FreeCAD is still generally miserable to use.
I don't know how long ago you tired this (early versions were, even I will admit, kind of crap) but in the current FreeCAD release of 0.22.1 it's incredibly easy.
Just select the edge(s) you want to fillet and and press the "fillet" button in the Part Design workbench...
And on the panel on the left you can set the radius. The profile of the Fillet tool is always a 90 arc of circle with the radius you've specified.
Or, if you want to get fancy and make your own bespoke custom fillet. Well, you can define its profile in a sketch. Here I just used a bezier to make an arbitrary curved shape. You are defining the profile of the material you want removed here, i.e. the negative space. You can make this as mathematically rigorous and precise as you like.
Then, position it somewhere on the vertex you want to profile and once again in the Part Design workbench, select that sketch, and hit "subtractive pipe."
From there, you can hit "add edge" to define which edge(s) you want it applied to. You get a preview of the material removed.
Et voila.
I appreciate all the effort you went to, and I can do this as it turns out. Now that I've researched what problem I was having, it turns out the issue was that I couldn't do a parametric offset line in a sketch, which was crucial to what I was doing at the time, so I had to give up on it.
I was using 0.19 at the time, because that's what I've got installed.
I’m curious what a parametric offset would be. If it is what I think it is, I’ve accomplished that with some construction geometry. Add a construction geometry line constrained appropriately (e.g. perpendicular to some other line, particular length, etc) and then use its other end to attach and constrain the offset line.
Yeah, that's what it is. That would probably work at least for straight lines, which was the case I was doing.
I would love for you to explain how the workflow is any different than in something like SolidWorks? I use SolidWorks in my day job and I use FreeCAD exclusively for my personal projects. It was a pretty seamless transition for me. Sketch->Feature, repeat, paying attention to order of operations in your model tree. What’s so different?
Is FreeCAD’s UI a little rough in places? Perhaps, but a lot of the things that people complain about in FreeCAD are present in commercial software. If there’s one thing that SolidWorks might do better is allowing you to get away with things like over-defining geometry accidentally. It’s more forgiving of lazy modeling.
FreeCAD has improved significantly in just the last few years. There is a good community around it. We need more people using it and learning how to model.
Very true, and the reason I went with Fusion in the first place. It's easy to pick up while still being fully featured.
How about OnShape
OnShape is free but explicitly non-commercial if you don't pay, and it requires your models to be publicly available in a potentially weird way where someone else could make money from your stuff but you can't. It's a weird AF licensing setup.
I like their pricing scheme though, because most makers work on open source.
Open source is not the same as, "you are barred from commercial use," which is why I hesitate with OnShape. At minimum, these companies need to tighten up their licensing terms to be strict but fair.
to wit, Creators have this:
but consumers have this:
Maybe there's some nuance I'm missing, but on its face that's total bullshit. You can use the trial version for commercial purposes as long as you don't intend to KEEP doing so, but not the free version. Meanwhile, you are automagically granting a license to commercialize your files for literally everybody else. Sloppy at best, exploitative at worst.
OnShape