Escape from the claws of the corporate CAD overlords - with FreeCAD!

FreeCAD has enormous aspirations - but it struggles to deliver. But use it right and it's actually pretty decent!

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[FreeCADAcademy]

Thanks for making FreeCAD more popular with your enormous reach!

[MaximKachurovskiy]

I switched to FreeCAD this year after a few years in Fusion 360. It was 10 hours of pain and now it's OK so if you're looking to make the switch, be ready to commit some time. The reason for FreeCAD complexity and fragility is that's tackling the 1-2 orders of magnitude more complex of a problem than the one OctoPrint is solving. Having many contributors probably also doesn't help with consistency, refactoring and feature removal (there's always someone who's used to an old way of doing something). FreeCAD was progressing nicely in the past few years though so there's hope. Please donate it some money :) I did.

[MMuraseofSandvich]

The good news about FreeCAD is that its dev community is more active than ever, and I really hope this means we'll get a workflow that rivals Blender or maybe even Fusion.

[deterdamel]

I started 3D modeling with freeCad. In the beginning it was a bit frustrating, but after watching some hours of tutorials and some practice it works without issues, doesn't hurt me anymore and does what I expect. And every new release makes big progress.

[unsearchable]

It definitely suffers from the pre-blender-2.8 problem of "this could be great, if it got usability polish for people who aren't FOSS die-hards". Hopefully we see that "blender 2.8" version of freecad someday.

[WurstPeterl]

Thank you for making this video! I sincerely hope FreeCAD gets the same development boost KiCAD got.
After Eagle got acquired by Autodesk in 2016, many open hardware products that had previously relied on Eagle 6 shifted towards KiCAD. Before the 4.0 release of KiCAD it was very similar in many aspects to the FreeCAD of today. It worked well enough for 95% of all tasks, but the workflow was never friction free. The immense contributions by CERN made KiCAD a whole lot better to the point where it is at least as good as other commercially available ECAD tools.
FreeCAD needs at least one developer who works full time on this and is capable of managing a team of volunteers and/or paid devs. And that needs funding…..lots of funding.

[jonallen]

Jumped into FreeCAD early last year after I finally got a 3D printer. A couple months went by where every part I designed was a struggle. I believe it's worth it to be free from Autodesk and keep my files local.

[GlenJackson]

As others have stated, the Topological Naming Problem seems to be what separates FreeCAD from the other parametric modeling programs that let you reference any geometry to perform new operations. FreeCAD will let you make the reference, but if the earlier geometry changes, the subsequent operations can fail or reference the wrong object. Keeping this in mind while modeling with FreeCAD helped me create more robust models. One method that tends to get around this is to use the FreeCAD spreadsheet to create a list of variables to contain your parameters, and then using those variables to drive your geometric constraints. This also puts all the inputs in one place rather than distributed across a number of sketches. I also found the tutorials by Free CAD Academy to be very helpful. In general, I'll use FreeCAD for the times I need something simple but parametric, but for something more complex or something that I do not expect the geometry to need to be edited parametrically, I'll use something like SketchUp or Rhino3D or Blender.

[ignoritos]

FreeCAD is listed as a main open source engineering tool by the Open Toolchain Foundation and already got some extra hands and funding (last week or the week before) for its development. OSEG is directly involved in the efforts.

[salsusmagnsu]

As a Linux user, I have used FreeCAD for Hobby 3D printing almost exclusively. Once I learned the quirks, I am productive and efficient at creating functional models. I have hundreds of functional models that I have created for the house, my cars, and other hobbies. I try to donate each year to the project. I really like having complete, perpetual ownership of my models and access to the tools to manipulate them. All the other packages seem to want you to store stuff in their cloud, or otherwise give them the power to squeeze you.

[ChazmillsADLT]

I’ve used FreeCAD for years and love that no one has asked me to subscribe….yet!
I am retired and my brain isn’t so good so I’ve never been able to use the sketch side of it but for the home items I design and use it’s great. Stuff for my caravan, car, tools and even catchers for my mosquito blinds. I’ve tried the others but far far too difficult for me. Thank you FreeCAD

[sirforcer]

As someone with a game dev/animation background, I mainly do direct modeling in Maya and Zbrush. However, ever since I started working in 3D printing I've had more and more clients bring me step files, which are not compatible with direct modeling tools. This is where free open source tools like FreeCAD are great for me. It might not be the best, but it has enough to at the very least allow me to open STEP files, make basic edits, and then export in a format that I can use in my preferred tools. It's probably not the intended workflow/use case of the software, but at the very least in that capacity it has become invaluable to my work.

[Slide]

I moved from OpenSCAD to FreeCAD. Once I got the drift of the sketches and constraints, my designs made a quantum leap. I'm now easily able to make parts that fit together properly. More complex parts take more time, but the results have been awesome. It works for me 🙂

[sgavy]

I personally believe it's going to take someone like Prusa to kick start an open source community focused CAD that makes functional sense.

[lukrative]

When I started learning CATIA v5 in college, I was at first put off by the dated UI, but quickly came to appreciate how polished the back end is. Apparently 20+ years of iteration (backed by lots of funding) worked most of the bugs out. I could count the number of times that CATIA has crashed on me on two hands, and that's after well over 1000 hours using it. Solidworks on the other hand...

[PUMAMicroscope]

I built a complex open source research grade 3D printable microscopy system entirely with FreeCAD. Many of my models are highly complex and I had no trouble designing them in FreeCAD. Interestingly I have no experience with other CAD packages so maybe this is why I do not get confused or frustrated. For example, I would go about modelling that planter pot in a very different way to you, the route you chose seems unnecessarily complicated and long winded but perhaps that is due to the prior experience you have with those other CAD packages. Thanks for the great video!

[TK-Titanium]

I had never used CAD software before trying FreeCAD. I struggled quite a bit but figured that was just the learning curve. It makes me feel much better to have you pointing out some issues you had as an experienced CAD user that reflected my own. I've successfully made several functional parts with it but it was always such an annoying, unintuitive, and vague-error prone struggle that I would resist using it.

[HexenzirkelZuluhed]

I've moved vom F360 to FreeCAD, and you are correct. It's a lot harder to get things done at first. You can get great results, but you got to know a lot more about the program. But I'm also one who prefers GIMP to Photoshop, because I know where all the stuff is in the tool I use.
On the other hand: there are a lot of improvements in the pipeline and I hope they will address some of the complaints you have. Still, at least to me the steeper learning curve did pay off.

[craigedwards]

Donations are always welcome Thomas so that FreeCAD becomes a better open source competitor to the commercial stuff.

[jonathanbecker]

I seldom go a month without using FreeCAD since ~2016. Just about any printed part in our lab was designed in it. Appreciation and gratitude.