I got stuck on googling how to make a fillet in freecad, to which the answer appeared to be, “yeah, nah, you sort of can’t”. Oh okay, this program is not for me.
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RobotToaster@mander.xyz 6 months agoYeah, I’ve used multiple CAD tools, from pro/engineer to F360, but the learning curve of freecad felt like a brick wall.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
chaotic_disorganizer@feddit.de 6 months ago
whens the last time you used freecad? theres literally a button for making fillets.
agent_flounder@lemmy.world 6 months ago
For years, in fact.
MrSpArkle@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
I tried using Freecad as to filet something recently and it told me to look at the error console for more information, after googling for where the error console is, I realized the message to look at the error console was being output to the error console.
There was no more information to be had. It is a UX and functional nightmare, and it is what it is, but the downside is this means millions of engineers are being trained on subscription web sites, and eventually this will be used to both squeeze people for money, and also to prevent people from creating unauthorized or patented parts.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
I honestly forget, it waa such a terrible experience I didn’t give it any more time. I think that the problem was that I couldn’t make it parametric.
TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 6 months ago
the fillet button 🤯
jomoo99@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Exactly the words that I had come to mind lol
Kata1yst@kbin.social 6 months ago
Huh, I've definitely done fillets before. Though they're more nuanced than F3D or SW or ProE.
I've found freecad to be feature complete and fairly performant as a pure CAD tool, but the workflows take getting used to and there are some rough edges where things are just significantly more complex than in competing commercial software.
wjrii@kbin.social 6 months ago
I think SolveSpace and OpenSCAD have trouble with fillets, but FreeCAD should be fine, though as a person with a non-technical background, FreeCAD is still generally miserable to use.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I don’t know how long ago you tired this (early versions were, even I will admit, kind of crap) but in the current FreeCAD release of 0.22.1 it’s incredibly easy.
Just select the edge(s) you want to fillet and and press the “fillet” button in the Part Design workbench…
And on the panel on the left you can set the radius. The profile of the Fillet tool is always a 90 arc of circle with the radius you’ve specified.
Or, if you want to get fancy and make your own bespoke custom fillet. Well, you can define its profile in a sketch. Here I just used a bezier to make an arbitrary curved shape. You are defining the profile of the material you want removed here, i.e. the negative space. You can make this as mathematically rigorous and precise as you like.
Then, position it somewhere on the vertex you want to profile and once again in the Part Design workbench, select that sketch, and hit “subtractive pipe.”
From there, you can hit “add edge” to define which edge(s) you want it applied to. You get a preview of the material removed.
Et voila.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
I appreciate all the effort you went to, and I can do this as it turns out. Now that I’ve researched what problem I was having, it turns out the issue was that I couldn’t do a parametric offset line in a sketch, which was crucial to what I was doing at the time, so I had to give up on it.
HewlettHackard@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
I’m curious what a parametric offset would be. If it is what I think it is, I’ve accomplished that with some construction geometry. Add a construction geometry line constrained appropriately (e.g. perpendicular to some other line, particular length, etc) and then use its other end to attach and constrain the offset line.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
Yeah, that’s what it is. That would probably work at least for straight lines, which was the case I was doing.
canthidium@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Yeah, I’ve done some editing in FreeCAD, but I’m lost at the rest.
VandalFan77@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I would love for you to explain how the workflow is any different than in something like SolidWorks? I use SolidWorks in my day job and I use FreeCAD exclusively for my personal projects. It was a pretty seamless transition for me. Sketch->Feature, repeat, paying attention to order of operations in your model tree. What’s so different?
Is FreeCAD’s UI a little rough in places? Perhaps, but a lot of the things that people complain about in FreeCAD are present in commercial software. If there’s one thing that SolidWorks might do better is allowing you to get away with things like over-defining geometry accidentally. It’s more forgiving of lazy modeling.
FreeCAD has improved significantly in just the last few years. There is a good community around it. We need more people using it and learning how to model.
dack@lemmy.world 6 months ago
FreeCAD definitely has a steeper learning curve and a few rough edges, but to me it was absolutely worth it to learn. I really don’t like my files subject to the whims of Autodesk.