As someone who learned CAD on autodesk (inventor) ages ago, the only free modeling software I could grasp after working for a few hours was Onshape. Usability seems to be a real problem in this space, Freecad for example seemed to have a billion ways to do the same thing, but in the end only one of them was the real way, some tutorials leaving me with a model that doesn't conform.
SolveSpace is good. It's the only free CAD software I've found that's remotely usable (yes including FreeCAD). Unfortunately it has some pretty big missing features, notably bevels & filets.
I also like SolveSpace a lot. I use it to design small things all the time. Tiny single file program, very responsive interface. It's also pretty intuitive (if you're already familiar with CAD constraints and parametric modelling concepts). There was a burst of activity 2-3 years ago so I was hopeful we'd get filets and maybe better error messages but it hasn't happened yet.
For those unfamiliar, Ondsel is just a custom build of FreeCAD, with some different UI/UX and workbench defaults and their cloud oriented plugin/features enabled by default. They also have some features that haven't yet made their way into a stable FreeCAD release, but most likely will eventually.
I've got no qualms with anything Ondsel is doing, except that their "releases" are based off of the dev versions of FreeCAD, which are still in active development where things are rapidly changing and are poorly tested as a whole package. This leads to the situation where, for example, very basic sketches will cause the most recent Ondsel version to puke in odd ways, but it's a problem that's already been fixed in the FreeCAD dev builds.
So certainly give Ondsel a try; there a lot to like, and they're adding some much needed features to FreeCAD, but until their releases are based off FreeCAD stable, treat it like the unstable dev build it is.
SolveSpace is how I teach people CAD at my local makerspace. It's the only program I know of that can be properly onboarded in an hour or so, figured out from there, is useful on its own, and that makes for a good stepping stone to Inventor/SolidWorks/OnShape/etc.
I pretty much only use the Part Design, Sketcher and Spreadsheet workbenches. Those mostly work OK together. I don’t dare branch out because of poor interoperability between benches; I sometimes use the Part bench as well but it’s so fiddly because you had to take it through two internal format changes to make it work in Part Design.
Hoping that one of the many open source CAD projects can supplant it eventually.
Onshape is an excellent tool in terms of performance and usability. As total newbie I was able to design fully working robot arm with 3d printed joints, design all the motors, their placements and other stuff and even animate movement.
The model even worked on my phone, while it was not very practical...
I used OnShape several years ago and loved it. Unfortunately, they priced me out — I'm in the "intensive hobby" segment, which means I'm fine with paying $500/year, but not OK with $1500/year. And OnShape is either free or $1500/year.
Another consideration for many is a good integrated CAM. This is where Autodesk Fusion, much as I dislike the company and the software, is unbeatable today.
I had 10y or so experience with CAD when onshape showed up around 2014. You could tell from the beginning that they cared a ton about usability and had their minds wrapped around how people use CAD. It’s only got better since.
I highly recommend the cadmium folks just soak themselves in onshape’s UX.
Why is open source always so bad at UUX - it's so frustrating. I believe the people who say FreeCAD is powerful but I'm skeptical I will ever experience it.
Probably because every contributor has their own variation of UX they prefer, which they contribute and merge with all the other code. It leads to a lot of inconsistencies which are avoided when you have a hierarchy and a leader who makes everyone adjust their vision. It’s hard to do that with smaller OSS projects, they probably can’t afford alienating contributors by telling them how to do stuff.
You can't do UI in small pieces. Most things like new algorithms or functionality can be added in a very localized way that doesn't impact other components. A UI on the other hand encompasses everything and also needs taste. And tastes are different.
> Why is open source always so bad at UUX - it's so frustrating.
To illustrate why... There's a certain "artistic" FOSS project (before you ask — not GIMP) where the community, incl. former lead dev basically say this:
- UX is bullshit, it's just opinions (verbatim quote)
- No two people agree on what is the right way, so anyone willing to improve UX in this project will have to fight everybody else, don't hold your hopes high (almost a verbatim quote)
- We don't like drama in this community, so we tend to just accept patches that change UI (you'd think this contradicts the previous statement, but somehow the impossible is possible)
They'd also mock a person who wrote a very elaborate first impressions blog post about the software, claiming she is an idiot who didn't bother learning the software.
I don't think the FreeCAD community was ever this bad, but there certainly was a strong element of chaos before. Things are considerably better today. There's a design working group working its way through various incosistencies, for one. It's a long-term project, no doubt about it, they are slowly getting there.
Agreed, as someone with significant experience with SolidWorks, and varying experience in Creo and NX, Onshape is the only "free" CAD software that has equivalent user experience to any of those, just such a shame that Onshape's "Free" option sucks and their paid option is obviously not priced for hobbyists. Fusion360 is workable, but its user experience is pretty terrible compared to any of the commercial packages I've got experience in.
My ask for a free CAD software would really be for someone to go through and take the robustness and speed of Creo and combine it with the user friendliness of Solidworks, even if it were to have a fairly limited feature-set to start.
Man, I thought FreeCAD’s problem was me being an idiot, but glad to hear someone else come to the same conclusion. I recently spent an hour or two almost every evening for about 3 weeks to come up with what I thought was a simple object I needed to print. The cycle was:
1) Watch and do one tutorial that gets you 80% of the way there.
2) Try to stumble together the rest of the way.
3) Find out the fundamental tutorial doesn’t set up my project in a way that allows me to finish the 20%.
4) Watch the whole project fall apart as I try to modify one of the previous steps.
5) Repeat.
Does the order typical matter that much in CAD? I went all in on this thinking it was a simple object and how hard can FreeCAD be. Turns out, very hard.
There are many, many bad small tutorials on youtube where the presenter has something that works for them but fails to understand the core principles. Or it's from way back before the 0.18 redesign of Part Design.
The Mango Jelly Solutions videos, the Joko engineering videos, the Adventures In Creation videos and thehardwareguy's videos are excellent.
There is no doubt that understanding how to mitigate TNP is important, though. Many of the videos do not go into this each time (which will be good once the issue is mitigated, very soon, but is obviously an issue at the moment).
The fundamental issue I see with bad Youtube tutorials is people skipping from Part Design to other workbenches without understanding that they are not wholly interchangeable. That is, all Part Design Body objects are Parts, but not all Parts are Part Design Body objects. Part Design is a subset.
There is at least one excellent video by Mango Jelly Solutions going into the detail of why you should choose one over the other.
But the guts of it is that Part Design does have an ordered flow -- it's a sequence of steps from a simple to a complete object, executed one after the other and implicitly booleaned together. So it has additive features and subtractive features.
Whereas in a non-Part-Design workflow, you are in charge of when something is cut from something else; there's no subtractive tooling, only boolean tools. More CSG-ish.
A good grasp of FreeCAD involves understanding Part Design's relatively special guided flow, and that outside of it is a more open-ended approach.
The RealThunder developments to Part Design after TNP was fixed do go a long way towards making this less relevant (Part Design can work with multiple bodies rather than being focussed on a single body, and you can "wrap" non-Part-Design objects in a Part Design Body object more freely without using a macro). And that way you get to use Part Design much more like Fusion 360.
But there are definitely FreeCAD proponents who would say that Part Design is training wheels for what is really going on, and that there's no substitute for many general concepts inside Part Design. The latter is true; also the implicit booleans in Part Design make some of the PD operations slower.
> Does the order typical matter that much in CAD? I went all in on this thinking it was a simple object and how hard can FreeCAD be. Turns out, very hard.
Yes, it does matter. I discovered this through my own self learning with OpenSCAD, FreeCAD and OnShape. I actually prefer the workflow of FreeCAD to OnShape for a lot of tasks.
FreeCAD isn't that hard, cad isn't that hard. Especially for any developer with some level of XP in breaking down a complex problem domain into smaller composable parts.
Similarly, I learnt PTC Pro/ENGINEER (now Creo) in university and have tried to learn SolidWorks, Tinkercad, Onshape and FreeCAD but never found them as usable or powerful as ProE. The constraint system, 2D sketch tool and assemblies were hard to map into these other systems.
I feel it’s similar to having learnt Photoshop (7) and then struggle to use GIMP. I keep looking for tools that aren’t there, expect panels to show certain details and they come up short.
It reinforces for me how valuable usability and interface design is for power user tools. But also, how important training materials are, and how loyal a user will be once they are accustomed to completing a workflow with their tool of choice.
Awesome work! It seems like a hard problem
Repo: https://github.com/MattFerraro/CADmium