Comment on Stepping up from Tinkercad but to what?
philpo@feddit.org 1 week ago
There are two more alternatives, sadly for Windows only.
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Solidedge Free for non-commercial makers, relatively easy to learn. But fucking expensive when you want to go commercial.
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Solidworks Relatively cheap for makers and students,really expensive for commercial. The maker version has a reduced feature set,but that’s not that relevant for most purposes (more towards simulation and things like that) Personally I would prefer it over Solidedge, but that’s more of a personal view.
BUT: Both are Windows only(more or less), and of course commercial.
Sadly FreeCAD is not even close to most professional products - while it can be used for a lot of things,these things will take longer, be often more unstable and less “straightforward”.Nevertheless for most non-professional uses,it will suffice.
cosmicrookie@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Thanks for the tips!
Can you explain examples of what FreeCAD is lacking at, compared to the pro software? I am not sure what I am going into, but would hate to limit myself or waste time/money just by making the wrong choice at this point
philpo@feddit.org 1 week ago
There are two sides of issues with FreeCAD: On one side it has usability issues. The comes largely from the “workbench” concept, so often you will be missing a tool unless you change workbenches which in terms leads to another tool missing. Furthermore the UI is not really consistent in how things are named, how things are done,etc. Same goes for the actual step of editing things. So while you eventually “get there”, especially as a newcomer, it will take time and a bit of try and error. Parametric solutions are also very clunky and often not as feature rich. (Which is a pain if using it for woodworking) Another thing that is the whole “derivate” thing most professional CAD solutions offer - e.g. build plans, CAM, BOM, simulation,etc. You can do them with FreeCAD, but it takes some plugins and is nearly as good or comfortable as the professional solutions.
The other side is performance and stability. FreeCAD is a nightmare when it comes to importing thing with a lot facets or large files, is unstable as fuck when working with large assemblies and generally is slower compared to other solutions. (Even the otherwise not very fast Solidworks is faster)
In the end I would recommend you to try all three of them (and a few others from the list) and then decide if you can be bothered to use FreeCAD or find another solution worth it more. (Personally I would avoid Fusion,btw. due to the fact that it gets more enshitified daily)