FreeCAD is surprisingly good, not just for an Open Source CAD package, but for a CAD package in gen
FreeCAD is surprisingly good, not just for an Open Source CAD package, but for a CAD package in general. I’ve used a lot of CAD packages and the learning curve wasn’t really any slower than when I went from Solid Edge (bleh) to Autodesk Inventor (The sketch constraints engine isn’t as powerful as the one in Inventor or Solidworks but it’s not ~bad~, you just need to be a little more explicit. Those counterbored screw holes were actually super easy, because I just applied them over the fillet on the corners and they snapped into place perfectly. A little more work and I’ll have this box down.FreeCAD does call extruding “padding” which is unacceptable, obviously :PI ain’t even a fancy mechanical engineer, the last time I did any real CAD was in my first-year drawing course that they make all the engineers, even us electricals, take. Admittedly I’ve been using parametric modellers ever since my brother (who is a fancy mechanical engineer) let me borrow his Solid Edge license key in high school.I could never get my head around primitives based modelling, it just seems loose and messy. Sketching and extruding, sweeping, cutting etc. all feel really mechanically visceral. It’s a lot more like machining, you make a shape and then cut chunks out and glue pieces on until you get the shape closer to what you want, repeat until you hone in all the dimensions you care about.Primitive modelling tends to all take place in 3D which is overwhelming (for me) and I’ve never gotten the knack of navigating 3D well enough to confidently grab a vertex and move it around and trust that it’ll end up where I want it. -- source link
#engineering#cad#freecad#open source#foss