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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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)
Designing 3D parts is hard enough, and while parametric modeling has uses... come on.
villgax•1h ago
* 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