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I thought I would knock some dust off my drafting skills after a small chat with @captain_[email protected]
Seeing this image on the tutorial made me realize, FreeCAD seems to be a Technical Geometry Super-Suite. It makes sense that CAD would grow to include all of these things. But I thought sharing the initial perspective of some one who hasn't looked at this stuff in about 18 years might be interesting.
Granted I'm not actually familiar with most of this stuff, and none of it from the POV of FreeCAD. If this can deliver 10% of what I'm looking at, I'm in for a treat.
Hey, I have used freecad a lot. FreeCAD is good, not great as a cad software. But it is the only truly "no strings attached." The problem with it was development was almost at a standstill for things that actually mattered. A new company has formed around commercializing it and are working with the original Dev team.
Updated UI, topological naming fix, some assembly and actual functional defaults were promised for Q1 2024 and releasing it as a 1.0 version.
I think it is worth it to learn how to use right now as in the next 2 years it should become an actual viable CAD alternative for things outside of simple projects.
I wouldn't try parametric models in freecad. They use a really really bad spreadsheet reference system that recalculates you model, not on every change, but every CLICK which means that when you have a variable that is reference more than 10 times or so, it begins to take longer and longer to even start to enter a new value. One time it took 5+ minutes just to get into the spreadsheet cell before even being able to edit its contents.
For parametric, use OpenSCAD (or openscad in freecad) until they implement actual, working variables.
I would clarify that you're talking about a specific usage case, that OpenSCAD does indeed do better at. However for most CAD tasks I find OpenSCAD is overkill and less intuitive.
"Parametric design" usually refers to the workflow used in the Part Design workbench, as well as SolidWorks etc. where geometry is defined by constraints.
The Part Design workbench does work well and despite the topological naming issue is sufficient for most hobbyist and many light industrial tasks. If I need to draw up an arbitrary bracket or bushing or similar, I don't even bother using a workflow that guards against the issue, I just use it casually like I would SolidWorks. Only if the part is complex or if I know it will need to be tweaked do I bother doing everything on datum planes etc. because it's a lot slower and more hassle.
That's very good news that the topological naming issue is being solved, though. #1 issue with FreeCAD IMO and the one that holds it back from serious industry use.
That's how parametric workflows work in some industries. In the architecture world of Rhino / Grasshopper and Revit / Dynamo, the expectation is that parametric scripts can do almost anything.