Wanted to share this since this was a long Project. Since Autodesk started changing Fusions functionality, from limiting active projects, to changing their terms of service. Since I need a CAD tool for my 3D Printable designs, I started migrating to a new cross platform CAD tool. That happened to be FreeCAD.
Learning FreeCAD wasn’t easy, but was well worth my time. And after slowly pecking at it for 11 months, I was able to re-build every design I made (that I cared about).
I’ve made my 3D Printable designs available on my GitHub if you are interested: https://github.com/the16bitgamer/16BitVirtualStudiosDesigns
I love them idea of free CAD, but it is so hard to do basic stuff. F360 knows when you click inspect and a circle or something then you’re trying to get a diameter. Fc, was always like, oh you wanted the distance between these arbitrary pixels? That’s 13.00007654 mm
B b b bug report time!
When I first started working with 3d modelling (for 3d printed parts), I followed everyone’s advice and got a trial of Fusion. Luckily, I didn’t use it much and when I came back to it, my trial was over. I did not want to use a hobbyist license, just to have things change - so went looking for FOSS alternatives. OpenScad made my brain hurt, but then I found FreeCAD. Definately hard to learn, and for someone new to CAD design - I am learning very slowly.
I watched a ton of videos, but still struggle. My saving grace was that I found the official discord. The users on the discord server can be super helpful with learing the nuance of the platform. Several times I posted a file and askded for help and had an answer within an hour. In fact, I just submitted a screenshot of my sketch with dimensions and someone went ot the trouble of recreating it and fixing my problem…so I recommend you join the server if you are struggling. Link below:
I taught myself freecad several years ago before discord took off and the curve is pretty steep I agree. Some things aren’t intuitive and version differences can be frustrating when watching videos.
Have you tried realthunders freecad fork?
I’ve recently been told that it would be vastly better than upstream due to massive fixes in the hierarchy/timeline, making changes much more likely to work.I haven’t tested it though, so no Idea if it’s actually true. https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases
/e: FreeCAD upstream is tackling the topological naming Problem as well though!
https://github.com/orgs/FreeCAD/projects/2/views/1
It will just still take some time.Nope, just vanilla FreeCAD. Been having an issue with FreeCAD on Windows and the GUI flickering like mad when I hover over new elements. If the next update doesn’t fix it, I might look into it.
I did the same thing over the past 6 or so months ago. There’s nothing I could do in Fusion360 that I couldn’t do in FreeCAD. People love to complain about FreeCAD, and it does have a steep learning curve, but once you learn to design in the way FreeCAD wants you to, it goes quite smoothly.
I’m barely able to design in Fusion I’m afraid I would be overwhelmed with free cad, on the other hand, I didn’t invest that much time in F360 so it’s less of a waste if I change.
You rock! I love the dedication you have to actually rebuild all your models.
Outside of the Stylus the rest weren’t difficult. Tedious, but simple.
Dude, awesome post! In the last couple of weeks I too have switched to FreeCAD. The real turning point for me was finding RealThunder’s fork which is infinitely more usable than the main fork due to stable geometry. At first I wasn’t so sure I could hack it, but in recent days I’ve been getting really comfortable. I haven’t opened Fusion in weeks for anything but to grab measurements from my old designs! Cheers.
How is FreeCAD’s toolset compared to Sketchup? I have long been irritated with F360’s tools because it really wouldn’t let me do super simple things very simply that sketchup, or even Blender does easily. Wasn’t worth putting up with the hassle of basic functionality just to take advantage of the limited more advanced functions IMO. Been giving FreeCAD the side eye and not sure if I want to torture myself with sorting it out.
I haven’t used Google Sketchup since 2017/2018 so take this with a grain of salt.
Sketchup is a simple to use, and a very beginner friendly CAD program, with crippling limited capabilities for my needs. I moved to Fusion 360 around 2017/2018 since I wasn’t able to make the shapes I wanted to. Chamfers, Fillets, and referencing previous parts for current designs.
If you are making simple shapes Sketchup is good, like boxes and circles… I feel it’s a step up from what I’ve seen of TinkerCAD. But I feel a better comparison for FreeCAD is with Fusion 360.
For what tools I need with designing 3D Printable parts, FreeCAD is comparable with Fusion 360. It’s just missing some Quality of Life features, like Chamfers that go beyond the edge and cut into a part, or text that can warp to a cylinder or exist between points A & B. There are some plugins that help and do work, but not to the same extent that Fusion does.
With that said play with the tool enough and you will find workarounds and alternatives that might even make your models better.
Thank you. Exactly the kind of comment I was looking for. You are exactly right about sketchup, way too many limitations.
Edit: went with Solidworks. Tried out FreeCAD and just couldn’t wrap my head around it, the workflow seemed too disjointed. For some reason Soldiworks clicked right away despite my dislike of F360’s system and the similarities between the two. Yeah, not free, but for a few bucks a month for the Maker subscription I couldn’t argue. None of Autodesk’s constant fuckery with license agreements and feature reductions.
