After doing the tut I can say that 1.1 is very nice, i can uninstall Fusion and Solid Edge finally :)
The guide i followed, no relation to it whatsoverer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxxDahY1U6E
You can do that in FreeCAD 1.1. Select the sketch, enable "Make Internals" in the data tab. You can also enable it permanently in settings.
For example, problems like this one. Or the confusing 3D navigation (switch to Gesture or TinkerCAD mode in the Settings), or the non-interactive view cube. And many other gotchas and paper cuts that can almost all be changed with a few clicks to make it more intuitive, or just more similar to popular competition.
It's a classic pattern with long-running FOSS projects. The authors get somewhat blinded to the pain because they're used to it, plus change is difficult for the established userbase. There's also a feeling that emulating competitors is surrendering one's own identity, and the idea that some of the rough edges are justified by "the powerfulness". Thus radically changing defaults, streamlining, simplifying and even just matching user expectations is often perceived as "taking the power away" and really difficult to have the daring-do to just do. Even though on the other side of the transition a much larger and happier userbase awaits.
A lot of FOSS projects eventually do mature to the point where they can pull this off, and I think there's real signs that FreeCAD is starting to get there. The upcoming 1.1 release has a ton of modern UI catch-up, such as on-canvas gizmos, and a few good defaults changes.
There's a lot more work to do, but like others I have the feeling that FreeCAD may well be approaching its Blender/KiCAD moment. I suspect becoming a contributor right now could be good fun.
I speak from experience! We've to some extent been on a similar journey with the Plasma desktop.
To make the necessary overhaul, someone with the "power to decide" is needed, which is somewhat incompatible with unpaid open source development. I think this video about Audacity's redesign is informative in this regard:
But I still hope for a "blender moment" where a concerted effort gets rid of old cruft, improves UI/UX and jump-starts growth (also in developers/funding) and further improvements.
It feels like all those 3D modeling apps like 3DSmax,Fusion even Zbrush share like 90% of their feature set but your are forced to literally juggle(for videogame dev at least) because of one or two arguably extremely niche capability.
Haven't used it much apart from some minor tests (I tend to prefer MoI3D, but that's in a different category in several ways...), but as far as FOSS solid modelers it seems like the most promising to me. I do remember some small UI quirks, but overall it felt very approachable and streamlined, and looking at the GitHub repo, development is active. FreeCAD IMHO is just too sprawling and complex, with seemingly little tought paid to UI/UX.
The problem with FreeCAD, on the other hand, is that it's a "just two more weeks and it'll be great" solution.
The developers are clearly talented in a raw-math kind of way, but FreeCAD offers the eternal promise of usability in the next release; while never delivering it.
Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.
This would perfectly explain why the FreeCAD experience is so consistently bizarre.
Has anyone tried that too?
If you've been around on the FreeCAD forums, you'll see that the majority of users essentially believe that all comparisons of FreeCAD with commercial CAD software is illegitimate and become incredibly defensive. They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.
It's like they've got the Steve Jobs attitude but without the good taste that justified it.
Exactly. These FreeCAD "strategies" you mention align themselves perfectly with the objectives of the legacy CAD industry: To delay; break; and obfuscate opensource CAD.
In other words: The FreeCAD team may not be infiltrated by the legacy-CAD industry, but its behavior is entirely consistent with such a state.
One solution is to fork the behemoth; but if FreeCAD is a hedge-maze-by-design, the only way to win is not to play the game: Build alternatives elsewhere, from scratch.
FreeCAD feels like a time-drainer honeypot. Though whether by accident, or malice, is unknown.
That said, pre-1.0 FreeCAD had a terrible UX so it was the best FOSS CAD option.
With the 1.0 release of FreeCAD the UX is much better though. There are still a few WTFs (e.g. it took me quite a while to figure out rollback is done via right-click->set tip, or something like that)... But overall it's better than Solvespace now.
I struggled through the earlier releases and now I use OnShape because I can seamlessly switch between work and personal computers. If I ever can drop that requirement I'd love to go back to FreeCAD now that it's "good".
I recently had a desperate need to 3D print a part and tried FreeCAD again. A couple of things changed: 1) 1.1 came out and 2) Mango Jelly created a playlist that essentially was "bare bones what you need to know to get started." It was slightly over an hour of the fundamentals of navigating and just enough tools.
I think FreeCAD was basically just way too buggy initially, especially on macOS. Things never worked like tutorials said, or even dot updates sometimes broke what was being taught in tutorials. Also, while great, MJ's other previous videos deep dove into specific tools. Over half of any particular video would discuss features that helped you become an expert, but overwhelming when it came to getting up and running.
Since then, I've felt much more confident about FreeCAD and have used it to knock out other pieces.
This time everything just installed, and Claude Code turned out to be pretty good. Designing with code is sometimes more work upfront, but iteration is so much better. You get proper abstractions: functions, encapsulation, loops. You can drop in a SAT solver to optimize part placement or grab data from an excel sheet. No more clicking through a GUI that crashes and loses your session. I've spent time with Fusion, SolidWorks, NX, OnShape, FreeCAD, and Rhino, and each has its merits, but none of them can benefit from the LLM revolution the way a code-first tool can.
I asked Claude Code to generate a set of Lego bricks in various sizes, apply a nice color palette, and pack them optimally into a grid. It needed some steering, but all in all I was impressed
also worth a look: build123d
I’m an CAD hobbyist, and I’ve tried to work with FreeCAD multiple times over past years, always failing….
…until I saw this video and learned about version 1.1:
FreeCAD is now in the same ballpark of capability and usability as Solidworks. It can still be a bit clunky and frustrating sometimes, but then so can most CAD programs, in their own ways.
Side note: the creator of the video above also has a video on optimising the FreeCAD interface. (There are some frustrations related to the interface generally, and this would seem to be a low hanging fruit for the FreeCAD team to address.)
It seems like it's fully community-maintained, there is no big company or foundation behind it. Honestly it's hard to believe!
There was just one major problem, the infamous "topological naming problem" which caused issues downstream is you edited a non-leaf node. That was pretty frustrating to deal with, but in later releases they fixed it I think. (Have not tried it since because I didn't have anything to model)
I don't know much about the internal architecture of FreeCAD. As far as I know, FreeCAD does a lot of heavy lifting including managing TNP. It's supposed to be handled by the CAD kernel - OpenCASCADE in this case. I suspect that the reason why open source CAD lags behind their proprietary counterparts is really the CAD kernel. Many proprietary CAD software share the same kernel, in fact. For example, SolidWorks, Solid Edge and OnShape use Parasolid. It tells you how critical the kernel is.
Perhaps we should be focusing more on a more capable open source CAD kernel. There are a few projects around that are trying this. But they either have very limited scopes, or don't have enough support and momentum.
Maybe then they'll notice that without Open Source training data it won't be able to solve the problem.
Personal Context: I am a civil enginer, and our requirement from CAD softwares are a lot simpler than Mechanical Engineering. Here on HN, whenever I see people discussing CAD, its the mechanical version of parts and 3d printing.
Shameless Plug: I have decided to try building my own! Over a long enough timeline, it is doable, including the UI/UX part.
Think of I beams, all major countries have national standards of shapes and sizes. There are many "devil in detail" nuances.
So, giving it a go myself. If not for others, at least for my own itch. This is one aspect of open source.
Finding Cadquery less of a hurdle for casual use. Wish I could run it from Termux though.
Speaking of KiCad, I am convincing lots of people to move from EAGLE to it now that EAGLE is about to be killed by AutoDesk, and everyone seem to be having a good time.
I am hoping FreeCAD can become good to the point I can convince people to move to it too.
I would kill for something like KiCad with more refined controls.
FreeCAD may also be good - it's the only other one I haven't tried.
On the other hand if you're convincing EAGLE users to move they'll probably be happy with KiCAD because they're already used to an even worse UX, as if such a thing were possible.
- colorise solid faces with random colors
- colorise faces by type (cylinder, plane, etc.)
- add 3D labels in the scene
Not least there are free (as in beer) solutions available, like fusion 360, that are enormously capable.
Theres certainly a place for open source, and openscad would be a great tool to reach for for procedurally generated models. But in all honesty, Freecad doesn't compare well to the professional tools in this space - not in the way that say, gimp does to its commercial competitors.
The current AutoCAD GUI is essentially unchanged from the 80s, so this shouldn't really be much of an issue. They added a ribbon probably 15 years ago at this point, but I can't think of any other major/recent changes. (But maybe there are some changes that I'm not familiar with, since I don't use AutoCAD very often and only started using it relatively recently)
Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint. You can push either kernel to its limits if you try hard enough, but OCC hits that ceiling much sooner. So any CAD tool built on top of it inherits that ceiling too.
Many such cases, not only in CAD area. Good non-dev FOSS software is exception, not a rule, and these exceptions pretty often have some corporate backing and are not purely community-driven. And even for dev tools there are proprietary offerings that are light-years ahead of anything FOSS, though people here are never going to admit it, as TTY clone running vi clone is supposedly all you need.
I don't state this with satisfaction, quite the opposite, but it is long since I became disillusioned.
The issue with this scad file is that I built the geometry up with no functions. I tried and failed to get them working so I just pushed through, so now it is mind melting to try to refactor it. I'm hoping to one day melt a mechanical mind to get it done. Until then, it's a fun challenge prompt for these models.
Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.
There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it. On the other hand, a single developer, in javascript, made a copy of photoshop, and most people I know prefer to use that over GIMP...
Just copy the UI that works, if you can't research your own UI.
PS: I've still not managed to learn Blender, not put enough hours in, it is a hugely complex beast of a program that basically requires keyboard shortcut use imho. That interface (beautiful as it is) has so many options that even if I know what I'm looking for I can't find it!
[1] https://www.abebooks.com/Blender-Book-Carsten-Wartmann-Starc...
For whatever reason, the FreeCAD community is explicitly against taking note from competitors. Copying the UI of the leader is a thoughtcrime.
Great alternative in-browser.
Popular opinions take ages to shift sadly.
https://magazine.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad
for the new UI --- any word on that? (Just an annotated copy would be great)
Apparently, one of the devs from Ondsel has done a soft-fork and is stumping for funding:
(but he wasn't interested in the feature I want, see below)
That said, I managed to make it through the tutorial for Dune 3D twice now (after a fashion), and I think that the tutorial needs to do a better job of explaining concepts from first principles: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/118 and https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/252 c.f., my own attempt to explain the commercial CAD/CAM software which a company I work for sells/supports: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing --- is there a really good book which explains fundamental 3D CAD concepts and terminology?
I'm way more successful w/ OpenSCAD (usually by way of BlockSCAD: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ or https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor) and the available printed books help a lot, though I've been using the new Python integrated version:
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
The thing which would really help me in FreeCAD would be having a graphical programming workbench as a first-class citizen, something like Grasshopper for Rhino3D, or the node editor in Moment of Inspiration 3D, or Dynamo as used for AutoDesk software --- any word on that?
I also am not a fan of the icon-only toolbars and so I always use this plugin: https://github.com/APEbbers/FreeCAD-Ribbon
IMO it's a big improvement (I have it configured to only show small sized icons with labels) but then again I know not everyone is a fan of this type of toolbar because of the amount of screen space it takes up.
I can't compare to any of the paid competitors as I've not used those, but in my opinion FreeCAD is slightly disappointing when it comes to UI, bugs and stability.
It's fine for simple stuff, but man, it can be frustrating to work with especially when working on something more complicated then running into random bugs or application crashes.
It's a great project though and very powerful.
Designing 3D parts is hard enough, and while parametric modeling has uses... come on.
I would love to go back to FreeCAD, but for now I'm using Onshape (I run Linux, so Fusion isn't an option).
I'm guessing you're trying to set a fillet which would completely consume one of the faces adjacent to the edge being filleted. In these cases I've found that a workaround is to make the fillet 0.001mm smaller than the size which would consume the entire face. You end up with a very very small amount of flat area but it's so small it doesn't show up during machining or 3d printing.
As I understand it, there are no other open source alternatives around. On the commercial side there are some, perhaps the foremost being the venerable Parasolid, which is used by Onshape, Solid Edge, Solid Works, Siemens NX, Shapr 3d and others.
Creating a solid 3d kernel is hard. Parasolid is from 1986.
These are almost all caused because they use Open Cascade under the hood
* This needs a better renderer in today's day & age
* Need cross-device/web support
* Topology Optimization w/ pure physics code
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Hopefully LLMs can work on forking this or adding better features with AI-assists