I tried FreeCAD years ago and it sucked balls. The best FOSS CAD software that I currently know of is SolveSpace.
However it has been a few years. Maybe they discovered UX... I will give it another try and report back!
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
61 points (98.4% liked)
Opensource
1463 readers
8 users here now
A community for discussion about open source software! Ask questions, share knowledge, share news, or post interesting stuff related to it!
⠀
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Ok first impressions:
- Rotate is Shift-Right-Click?? Very weird default choice. Most programs use middle-click.
- I created a simple sketch with a couple of slots. Surprisingly smooth! Vastly improved from when I last tried it. Still not quite as good as SolveSpace for sketch creation, but to be fair SolveSpace was originally created to demo of a state of the art sketch solver... I couldn't find the Dimension tool, but guessed the shortcut was D, which was correct.
- Extrude is misnamed as "Pad". Why?
- Clone icon is a sheep :-D - actually the icons are all pretty great.
- Cut is called "Pocket"?? Actually the icon for this is not great. Minor issue though.
I only made a very simple part, but I am impressed. This is significantly better than when I last tried it, when it basically didn't work at all. I haven't tried assemblies or anything complex (e.g. extruding up to a non-flat surface, degenerate geometry etc.), but definitely for simple tasks you could use it.
It's night and day, even between the "previous" version and this 1.0 release. You can change the navigation, they have presets that mimic other CAD programs / modelling software, so you can even have Blender style shortcuts if you want to for some reason.
Pad and pocket are the same nomenclature as CATIA. Not sure if I've changed controls at some point, but hold middle mouse, click right mouse is how I rotate. New dimension tool, I'm not a huge fan of, but might just need some practice, for reference L and I give horizontal and vertical dimensions.
Need to get on with a project to try V1.0 out again soon.
Ondsel was a suite of mods that made FreeCAD much more user friendly. V1.0 incorporates most of these, and I didn't really have any major complaints about it. I used older versions, and yeah they sucked balls. It's better now.