FreeCAD 1.0 finally dropped!

Ondsel's goal was to make money by selling cloud services for CAD users. They were probably bound to fail in that endeavor-- and they did. Still, it was worth a shot. But their biggest contribution to FreeCAD was being the adult in the room and getting all the different groups to agree on how to move forward to solve the biggest problem, the TNP issue that FreeCAD had from the start and couldn't be arsed to fix. Ondsel's lasting contribution is the Assembly workbench that is now be the default Assembly workbench for FreeCAD. And it's a lot better than the other 3 hacked solutions.

realthunder was involved in folding his TPN solution into this 1.0 release. Though my understanding is that it's different than his implementation. He is now back to his fork and is supposedly cleaning up his code to work better with the mainline branch of FreeCAD to make his code easier to insert.

Personally, I would move to either the stable 1.0 release now or, I you are crazy like me, the 1.1 weekly releases-- brought to you on github every Tuesday and Saturday for your alpha enjoyment of the bleeding edge.

Me too. Ondsel wouldn't have been possible without the massive amount of work that previously happened on FreeCAD.

If you want to be supporting FOSS, this is how you do it.

It's also likely, consider the first paragraph of their goodbye, that it has more to do with competing in a commercial CAD space (where engineers are trained on specific software different from FreeCAD in school) than anything else.

Interesting, when I started using FreeCAD I had 0 training, and I have managed to make it work just fine. Was mostly frustrated by the topological naming problem, but that is fixed now.

You can do quite complex things with it.

You just have to put in a bit of effort and think in an additive sketch-extrude workflow. But yeah, not easy to transition from solidworks.

Oh lawd, another thing to check out

Is it decent ? Yes

Should I look elsewhere? Also yes.

CAD is difficult to understand on a good day, and FreeCAD is a beginner unfriendly implementation of it.

I personally love it and it’s an excellent tool if you already know what you are doing. If you don’t, it’s a mess of screens and spaces with no rhyme or reason.

My two cents. Learn CAD first, Google Sketchup or Fusion 360 are good and beginner friendly with lots of tutorials. Then move to FreeCAD to learn the differences.

That said if you want to just try FreeCAD, this release is the best I’ve used from them.

FreeCAD has long had open source disease in that it is very powerful and yet a pain in the ass to work with partially through crap UI design.

1.0 includes a lot of changes that address this. They've modernized a lot of it, added a lot of missing features, and brought a lot of things up to modern snuff.

There are things I like about FreeCAD better than Fusion360, for example FreeCAD has a spreadsheet built into it. Fusion360, last time I used it, had a kind of underbaked Parameters list that you couldn't even sort, the ability to have a spreadsheet for your dimensions and such.

All Parametric CAD software is complicated to use, you need to wrap your head around designing with rules, but once you get that basically all of them unlock.

No. The people who struggle with FreeCAD struggle because they leaned something else first. Its the same reason Photoshop trained users complain about GIMP while people who learned GIMP first dont complain.

Learn FreeCAD first, and you won't be handicapped

CAD is a bit like programming, there's a lot of ways to do any given task. That can make it tricky if you are doing some tutorials that use one workflow, and then start doing tutorials that use a different workflow.

If you want to learn it, do yourself a favor and take time to find a tutorial that goes from start to finish doing the type of project you want to do so you don't get frustrated when you get midway through.

Like others said, if you are used to doing something in a different CAD software, you might find that the same workflow is clunky in FreeCAD, but if you start out with a workflow that works well in FreeCAD, you are fine.

pretty much, but its really crossing some thresholds lately which i find impressive

All the others you listed are very similar to solidworks and no problem. FreeCAD decided sketching should be completely different. I can barely even draw a line and I don't understand how that's possible.

Part, part design, arch, curves, draft, and sketcher for me. Everything I need for 3d print modeling as well as larger scale planning. I recently stumbled on to the spreadsheet/data tab and don't know how I've gone so long without it. Very handy for named dimension references all in one place

Also this channel has many new videos with freecad 1.0. Especially for woodworking

https://youtube.com/@deltahedra3d

Ondsel was not a profitable product as far as I understood. Which is understandable, but I think they would have needed more time and money to make freecad a real competitor over established cad tools

You can even run some of them under linux with this driver: https://github.com/FreeSpacenav/spacenavd

Awesome!!

For some people it simply does not help with the workflow. For me it is a significant upgrade as it allows me to never use the normal mouse to move around in 3D, and allows me to quickly move the view to where I want it to be. Without it, moving in 3D just feels clunky to me.

But as I said, it is a preference.

I don't have as many hours in SolidWorks but for me, trying to navigate without a 3d mouse feels like riding a bike with square tires. I could manage to do it but why. At the end of the day though it's a preference. Likewise I have to murder the x and y axis on it for things to click in my head, which is another preference. I suppose growing up as a gamer may have something to do with that. I don't want to move/rotate the object, I want to move/rotate the camera..

I really got used to a space mouse with a piece of software called Geomagic Wrap, which we were using to take point clouds from a 3D scanner and turn them into solid models. Part of that process involves turning the model every which way to look for holes and whatnot in it to correct, and being able to use both hands for this really sped up the process. At this point I just cannot stand doing the Click-a click-a click-a click-a required to move a model around with the mouse. And if I'm modeling something large like a building or a landscape in a video game? Forget it. I want to be able to fly the camera around.

I like LibreCAD, but it's a little too simple sometimes. I miss the power of AutoCAD, but I don't miss its price.

Three things I want are

• being able to assign heights to objects and do 3D stuff
• being able to assign labels to objects (instead of circle3761 I'd like to call it 'fountain' or something)
• splines are really finicky, and you can't do things like a fillet on more complex objects

It took a couple of days to get used to and probably a week of use before I was 100% comfortable, but I find that it meets most of my needs now.

Plz keep us update on your thoughts, progress, etc. There has very few posts on this topic.

0.9.final.revised.25BAK.lastbest.final

I'm just surprised that it's so new

Oh, cool! Excellent.