I wouldn't mind having my models public, but that it SaaS is such a nuisance and the reason I am sticking to FreeCAD. I want to be able to edit offline, like on an airplane and not lose the ability to edit my stuff if some company shuts their servers down.
I probably spent 100 hours trying to tame FreeCAD, and ended up thinking CAD was just not for me. I then tried Onshape and found out that the problem was elsewhere.
Did you do any tutorials? I've done like 10 hrs of the MangojellySolutions beginner tutorials on YouTube and after that I've been pretty much able to do what I want or only had to look up solutions to a very specific problem.
I one time had an issue where I messed up and had to post on the FreeCAD forum and got two of the best responses I've gotten anywhere on the internet ever. Two people opened up my model and took screenshots highlighting where my issue was and gave me several suggestions on how to improve my model in other ways. The initial time investment was substantial and there are still a few workflows that could be smoother for me (attaching a sketch to a different face after it's been created), but that's fairly minor.
A big part of those 100 hours were spent watching these kind of videos.
And I asked countless questions on the forum as well. People were always very helpful.
But there’s a point where you just give up.
Having never used OnShape before, it literally took me half a day to get something done and submitted for external production. I tried that design first in FreeCAD, after those 100 hours, and got nowhere.
Agreed. The UI is painful, but the project priorities are correct: fixing TNP and fillet/chamfer needs to come before the polish. First make it minimum viable for the non-zealous, then we can talk about drawing attention with a sexy dark-mode-by-default UI overhaul. It's getting close, but that makes this the most important time to exercise restraint.
Alas, fully fixing the issues with fillets and chamfers may be impossible, because those specific problems are quite foundational issues in OpenCascade. I don’t know if it’s even possible for FreeCAD to know that a fillet would fail by testing it, because of limitations with the responses that come back from the kernel.
It might be possible to predict which edges would have problems, but I think that would involve repeating geometry calculations outside the geometry kernel?
Specifically the main problem with fillets/chamfers in OCC is that the new face cannot completely consume/replace an existing edge.
That is to say -- I think!? -- that one of the edges of the new fillet/chamfer is always an existing edge just displaced, and no edges are destroyed. If an edge would be destroyed, then it fails?
But this is just my colloquial/folklore understanding.
There have been newer versions of OCC that FreeCAD has not yet switched to, I think. (And there is a new (Chinese) fork, called OpenGeometry.)
So maybe there are some fixes already in the pipeline or in the future. But they are somewhat out of the FreeCAD project's control, is my understanding.
I definitely agree on it not being intuitive. Something where I likely will spend hundreds of hours of work and learning is something I want to be unambiguously available to suddenly being taken away from me or be behind a paywall of thousands of dollars. You are 100% correct though that this tradeoff isn't for most people.
I don't know if you can really get away without learning general things about CAD systems if you want to make complex things, because those general things are so influential on the existence and design of real world objects.
It's like saying "but I don't really want to learn about different programming languages or software design, because I only want to write apps for iPhone."
If you want to make very simple objects and not learn deeper concepts, use TinkerCAD. It's fine. Weirdly competent in places; people pull off crazy stuff. It uses a simple physical world model.
Beyond that, you need more abstract tools. Ultimately you have to decide whether you want to exist within the (shifting) free plan limitations of a commercial cloud package, spend money on something like Alibre Atom3D, pay the cloud firms, or use something open source.
I'm not sure if it should be surprising that the open source systems are more of a commitment.
FreeCAD (main branch) has one fundamental limitation which is being mitigated -- the topological naming issues -- and some smaller issues to do with fillets/chamfers, but apart from that is a disorganised-but-competent, open source workbench-based system.
And the tradeoffs are not straightforward. This is less like Photoshop vs GIMP and more like ArcGIS vs QGIS. Is ArcGIS initially more coherent? Yes, allegedly. Is it universally more powerful? No.
FreeCAD is really a lot like QGIS, IMO.
You can learn QGIS, and when you learn it, you might decide that the freedoms and flexibility it offers are worth the pain. Or you might front up the cash for ArcGIS.
100 hours of watching videos and trying to make something and not getting anywhere vs a few hours.
The problem was not about getting away with it without learning general principles.
Of course, those 100 hours taught me about principles that were applicable to OnShape as well, so it’s not entirely apples to apples.
BTW, the issue was never TNP. It was everything else. The absurd separation between Parts and bodies and whatnot. The 5 different assembly benches, none of them good. The crashes. The way you need pixel precision to grab a vertex or an edge. And if some operation cuts a part in multiple disjoint pieces, only one survives.
My wife told me to stop doing what I was doing because I ended the weekend with way more frustration than the work week.
I've not watched 100 hours of videos at all and I've made and printed fully parametric designs with four variants driven by two configuration tables. I don't think it's that hard to learn.
> The absurd separation between Parts and bodies and whatnot.
Again, Parts/Bodies, it's confusing (and Part Design should be called "Single Body Design" IMO) but there are videos that explain the difference.
(I gather it comes from CATIA, and CATIA users are comfortable. Either way you don't have to use both; it's possible to never touch Part Design and do absolutely everything.)
I don't think I got it initially but now the difference is useful. There could be more work to allow non-Part-Design Parts to be wrapped in Part Design bodies. There's a macro (pdwrapper) for this, and Realthunder's branch built it in.
There could be better explanations on how Part Design works, how you build a Part Design Body from existing Parts and how you later combine them.
> The 5 different assembly benches, none of them good.
I feel this pain and I mostly avoided it by just using static placement. There's a new built-in Assembly workbench with a sophisticated solver that is being added in 1.0 which will land in the next two to three months (and is already in 0.22-dev and Ondsel 2024.2). I am going to dive in with that.
> The crashes.
Not a problem I have on the Mac at all now; 0.21 is really stable. Though startup crashes are common on Linux due to W****nd and the complexities of compiling support for it. The Flatpak appears to solve those. Ish.
> The way you need pixel precision to grab a vertex or an edge.
There is a preference setting (a newish one) that makes edge selection rougher/easier.
> And if some operation cuts a part in multiple disjoint pieces, only one survives.
Only in Part Design, which (in mainstream FreeCAD) is concerned with only one contiguous object. In fact, that operation actually fails. (A Body can be started with a compound of multiple pieces, but the first feature has to join them).
RealThunder's branch can support Bodies made of separate solids, and maybe that will come to mainstream once the TNP fix, which is a prerequisite, is in.
Outside of Part Design, objects split as you'd expect.
I don't think FreeCAD is perfect. That would be silly. But none of the "free" plans of the commercial cloud packages are right for me.
