I might take a look - the learning curve on FreeCAD is pretty steep. Not that I wouldn’t expect any other CAD to be much easier, but I feel there’s a lot of assumed knowledge about concepts that appear to be unique to FreeCAD. Kinda increases the study load, if you catch my drift.
Comment on So glad I'm ditching these fucking idiots
n3cr0@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Almost the same situation here. However, my first designs in freeCAD had lots of errors and I experienced lots of crashes and bugs. Didn’t really get into it.
My tool of choice is now OpenSCAD. It does exactly what you are designing - not more, not less.
DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com 4 months ago
BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 4 months ago
FreeCAD is definitely getting there. Not 100% ready for prime time, but definitely getting there.
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 4 months ago
any advice on getting constraints to actually behave? I can’t seem to get it to actually create geometries more complex than a box. (and forget master-sketches. that irritates me.)
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Here is a tip: constraints don’t need to behave. You can leave parts unconstrained and it will still work.
You can just eyeball the placement, and make sure the constraints that matter are constrained. The rest you can leave floating freely.
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 4 months ago
FreeCAD has an OpenSCAD plugin. Personally, I’d stick with FreeCAD regardless of workflow since you can do both in it. It has its quirks, but once you get used to it, it’s great.
ikidd@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Check out the Adventures in Creation YT (or Piped) channel. He does a very exhaustive set of tutorials from beginner to advanced that is well produced and explained.
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
MangoJelly (also on youtube) has a bunch of beginner friendly FreeCad tutorials.
DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com 4 months ago
Thanks for that. One of the things that really helped me start using F360 was the 3x20min videos made by Lars Christensen. Looking at the channel you’ve just recommended, he appears to have done something very similar. I’ll enjoy working through those. Cheers!
Herbert_W@discuss.online 4 months ago
Fellow OpenSCAD user here. I’d recommend it to anyone as a thing to try, but not necessarily as a thing to certainly end up using.
I love how much control it gives you over your designs and how you can use that to make intelligently parametric parts. I’m continuously frustrated by how it expects you to make (or find libraries for) everything from scratch. For example, I’ve recently discovered ClosePoints which is (a) brilliant and (b) makes me wonder why the heck this functionality isn’t built-in or at least in a default library. I’ve also found that using it for anything complicated has forced me to learn how to write better-organized code.
You still have to put in work to learn how to use it. It’s just a different kind of work.
RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If it’s somehow possible to code up my design In OpenSCAD, it’s infinitely more preferable over FreeCAD
p1mrx@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Rendering Comment Reply using CGAL…
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cynar@lemmy.world 4 months ago
While OpenSCAD is amazing, it is limited in some ways. It is also very marmite-like. You either love it or hate it.
For those confused, OpenSCAD is a scripted CAD package. You effectively write code, rather than dragging the mouse around. I personally love it, but I know others who absolutely hate it for the same reasons. It depends a LOT on how you think about problems.
Jawa@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Don’t bring the marmite into this!
cynar@lemmy.world 4 months ago
But it splatters so well, when you throw it at someone I disagree with!
Jawa@lemmy.world 4 months ago
But does it splatter better than Vegemite?