Recently I’ve been having feelings about moving away from Fusion 360. The combination of cloud app / filesystem and their demonstrated willingness to remove features and add arbitrary limitations (eg. 10 editable model limit) makes me feel uneasy about using it. To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it. If you’ve ever rented a house you’ll know the feeling - you quite don’t feel like it’s really your home, if the landlord wants to make renovate or redecorate you don’t have any choice and you could be evicted at any moment.
So I tried FreeCAD. At first, I have to say that it felt a little like stepping out of a spaceship (Fusion) and banging rocks together like a caveman. It’s not that you can’t do (most) of the same things as an enterprise CAD package, but the killer feature of Fusion is the level of intuitiveness and “it just works” that makes FreeCAD seem like trying to write Latin.
After a week of on-and-off learning I was not sure I wanted to continue. Even after getting comfortable with the basics, frustration levels would spike to 11 sometimes. The main issue I kept running into was that altering a previous feature would break everything that came after, requiring a varying amount of work to fix. The FreeCAD wiki suggests ways to mitigate this but many of them are un-intuitive and/or inconvenient. After some googling this seems to be caused by a pretty difficult to solve issue called the “Topological Naming Problem” (where FreeCAD can’t keep track of surfaces / edges / vertexes in a stable fashion when features are changed). Then I came across this blog post that pointed out a fix has actually been developed earlier this year. A developer by the name of RealThunder has created a fork of FreeCAD called “Link Branch” which can track topology in a (more) stable fashion.
I tried this branch and was blown away by how much more usable it is. Not only can it handle changes to past features almost perfectly, but I can create multiple bodies from a single sketch (not possible before) and there are other UI tweaks that make creating features easier such as the ability to preview fillets and chamfers at the same time as selecting their edges. I’m not totally sure which of these features are unique to Link branch vs which might be pre-release in the main branch, but certainly the topology naming fix is unique to Link.
So if you have tried FreeCAD in the past and been frustrated, or if Fusion’s past free license changes or price increases are making you uneasy, give the Link Branch a try! Downloads are available in the releases page.
the biggest turn off of freecad to me was the usability. It felt clunky, and frankly, it didn’t give the ability to follow my normal work flow. definitly going to give this a try, thank you.
I won’t say that FreeCAD has a good UX, but it helps a lot NOT to look at it as a CAD software, but as a collection of specialized engineering tools, organized into workspaces, haphazardly put together.
First thing you need to know is which workspace you’ll need, and FreeCAD does a terrible job at explaining you that (the concept of workspaces isn’t self explanatory) AND describing what each and every one of them does. Some of which should just be disabled by default because of how fringe, unpolished or unreliable they are.
Once you’ve got that part cleared, you can learn the primitives and the jargon (what’s a body, solid, part, mesh, element, …), not great, but fair. Then, you have to learn, for every workbench, what their workflow is (e.g. create a body, create a sketch, apply transformations ; Create an analysis, define material, define loads, add a mesh, add solver, add equations, run solver, add results, tweak the pipeline so it renders, show results), and yep, FreeCAD won’t hold your hand for any of that, you’ll have to wear your explorer hat and navigate from frustration to incomprehension until it accidentally works.
But then, if you can get over that, you’ll end-up with a tool that’s more powerful and versatile than anything else, including dandy commercial offerings. It still blows my mind that nowadays anyone in their garage can do for free what not so long ago would require a full engineering curriculum and corporate sponsorship to acquire licenses. My hope is that FreeCAD would gain the same kind of visibility that Blender enjoys, with sufficient funds for a small dev team and a great product manager.
To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it.
No, nope, nope, nope. Abolish this line of thinking right now. Any company that employs the predatory licensing tactics like those AutoDesk uses are not worthy of one single synapse’s worth of your continued thought. Fuck them. Shed not a single tear. They’re not giving you anything; they’re trying to lock you in as a future revenue source. Thus you have nothing to be grateful for, other than the bullet you’ve now dodged. You are Lot. Walk away and don’t look back, lest you turn into a pillar of salt.
I don’t usually get into this sort of Stallman style FOSS rant, but the behavior of the major players in the commercial modeling space – especially AutoDesk and SolidWorks/Dassault – is just exceptionally bullshit. Pandora’s box is already open on the hardware; any fool with thumbs, a credit card, and internet access can either buy or build an actual 3D printer. So instead they’ll do anything to lock the software side of this wonderful technology in their own proprietary, pay-to-subscribe box.
The Topological Naming Problem has been a thorn in the side of FreeCAD users since the dawn of time time, and while some work was put into the 0.2x release to address this (previous versions were even worse) it’s obviously still not perfect. For anyone not comfortable keeping track of forks and splits and unofficial releases, the intent for the Topo Naming fix developed in this release is for it to be incorporated back into the main line release… eventually. Also, even the most recent release of Realthunder’s fork is one major revision behind the main line release, and also has not been updated since the beginning of this year.
Despite all of this, FreeCAD along with all of its quirks and foibles represents an incredibly important bulwark against keeping a critical aspect of our hobby out of the clutches of corporations and other related doers of evil. Stick with it.
Yeah, but I need my CAD software to work. I’m working using it. I’m not here to be a bulwark against the corporations to gimp myself and not use something better.
No one is asking you to be a bulwark. FreeCAD is doing it for you.
If you have a use for commercial software for commercial purposes, that’s fine. But most of us don’t, and the notion that our access to the software we need exists entirely on the whim of some fucking corporation is not acceptable. One who can easily decide that the hobbyist license tier is gone, or the tier you need now costs 3 times more because reasons, and by the way the file formats are all proprietary so good luck migrating to a new package.
It’s not paying for it that bothers me. It’s being milked for Yet Another Subscription. For sake of argument, I have and heavily use a licensed copy of CorelDraw for 2D vector art, but it’s a version I paid for and I can use it perpetuity. It’s not a subscription; no one can take it away from me. Sure, if I want the latest whiz-bang version I may have to pay for an upgrade license. But I don’t care about that, so I haven’t, and the copy of Corel I bought in 2008 (!) still works just fine. You can’t say that about Fusion 360.
I like to refer to that license model as “Drawbackware.” “We’ll offer a less expensive or free version with a lot of the usefulness gouged out.”
It’s not the gouging out that bothers me. It’s the constant looming threat that they’ll take whe whole thing away and all of your work will be locked inside it unless you pay them.
