Recently I’ve been having feelings about moving away from Fusion 360. The combination of cloud app / filesystem and their demonstrated willingness to remove features and add arbitrary limitations (eg. 10 editable model limit) makes me feel uneasy about using it. To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it. If you’ve ever rented a house you’ll know the feeling - you quite don’t feel like it’s really your home, if the landlord wants to make renovate or redecorate you don’t have any choice and you could be evicted at any moment.
So I tried FreeCAD. At first, I have to say that it felt a little like stepping out of a spaceship (Fusion) and banging rocks together like a caveman. It’s not that you can’t do (most) of the same things as an enterprise CAD package, but the killer feature of Fusion is the level of intuitiveness and “it just works” that makes FreeCAD seem like trying to write Latin.
After a week of on-and-off learning I was not sure I wanted to continue. Even after getting comfortable with the basics, frustration levels would spike to 11 sometimes. The main issue I kept running into was that altering a previous feature would break everything that came after, requiring a varying amount of work to fix. The FreeCAD wiki suggests ways to mitigate this but many of them are un-intuitive and/or inconvenient. After some googling this seems to be caused by a pretty difficult to solve issue called the “Topological Naming Problem” (where FreeCAD can’t keep track of surfaces / edges / vertexes in a stable fashion when features are changed). Then I came across this blog post that pointed out a fix has actually been developed earlier this year. A developer by the name of RealThunder has created a fork of FreeCAD called “Link Branch” which can track topology in a (more) stable fashion.
I tried this branch and was blown away by how much more usable it is. Not only can it handle changes to past features almost perfectly, but I can create multiple bodies from a single sketch (not possible before) and there are other UI tweaks that make creating features easier such as the ability to preview fillets and chamfers at the same time as selecting their edges. I’m not totally sure which of these features are unique to Link branch vs which might be pre-release in the main branch, but certainly the topology naming fix is unique to Link.
So if you have tried FreeCAD in the past and been frustrated, or if Fusion’s past free license changes or price increases are making you uneasy, give the Link Branch a try! Downloads are available in the releases page.
To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it.
No, nope, nope, nope. Abolish this line of thinking right now. Any company that employs the predatory licensing tactics like those AutoDesk uses are not worthy of one single synapse’s worth of your continued thought. Fuck them. Shed not a single tear. They’re not giving you anything; they’re trying to lock you in as a future revenue source. Thus you have nothing to be grateful for, other than the bullet you’ve now dodged. You are Lot. Walk away and don’t look back, lest you turn into a pillar of salt.
I don’t usually get into this sort of Stallman style FOSS rant, but the behavior of the major players in the commercial modeling space – especially AutoDesk and SolidWorks/Dassault – is just exceptionally bullshit. Pandora’s box is already open on the hardware; any fool with thumbs, a credit card, and internet access can either buy or build an actual 3D printer. So instead they’ll do anything to lock the software side of this wonderful technology in their own proprietary, pay-to-subscribe box.
The Topological Naming Problem has been a thorn in the side of FreeCAD users since the dawn of time time, and while some work was put into the 0.2x release to address this (previous versions were even worse) it’s obviously still not perfect. For anyone not comfortable keeping track of forks and splits and unofficial releases, the intent for the Topo Naming fix developed in this release is for it to be incorporated back into the main line release… eventually. Also, even the most recent release of Realthunder’s fork is one major revision behind the main line release, and also has not been updated since the beginning of this year.
Despite all of this, FreeCAD along with all of its quirks and foibles represents an incredibly important bulwark against keeping a critical aspect of our hobby out of the clutches of corporations and other related doers of evil. Stick with it.
Thank you!
Imagine what the FOSS CAD space would look like if AutoCAD etc didn’t offer anything for makers!
Fusion 360 is amazing in the Getting Shit Donetm department, which is the weak point of FreeCAD. I have managed to steer through the byzantine UI of FreeCAD to create a CAD model, but it needed support by someone who has spent years in that application to get the more complex stuff, and even he didn’t exactly know how to achieve it, and that’s on top of me having participated in a 16 hour workshop on how to use FreeCAD. For Fusion 360, I’ve watched a few 5 minute videos on their official channel and that’s it, everything else I was able to accomplish through just looking at the UI.
I learned Fusion 360 before FreeCAD, so it’s not just that I had prior experience in another similar tool.
I think the basic problem with FreeCAD is that it’s a collection of tool benches written by different people who don’t talk to each other. They have overlapping responsibilities while still having vastly different feature sets and don’t integrate with each other most of the time. So, if you want to create a model, you first have to plan ahead to understand what kind of features it’s going to have, and based on that, you have to decide which collection of tool benches you have to pick. More than once I picked the wrong one in the start and then had to do everything all over again in the different one once I ran into a dead end.
Fusion 360 feels like it was written by a single team with a single vision, and everything fits together.
Yeah, but I need my CAD software to work. I’m working using it. I’m not here to be a bulwark against the corporations to gimp myself and not use something better.
Isn’t it wild that all the FORKS of FreeCAD somehow manage to have better versions? FreeCAD is OVER 20 YEARS OLD.
How is it still such a piece of shit software? Because the maintainers are garbage. It has nothing to do with the topology problem, it has to do with workflow, and FreeCAD lacks it almost completely.
Edit: Ohhh, this is realthunder’s fork! Glad to see he’s continuing on it, but yeah - I think by now most FreeCAD users had known/switched over to his version anyhow.
I didn’t know about and was one of the reasons I was not using free as. Now I’ll have to try it again.
I didn’t know, either.
You sound like an ungrateful brat!
They sound like a realist. If every branch has a better version than main, then what are you doing with the master branch in the first place? There are a lot of glaring issues with the software. It spent so much time in development already, it should’ve been a second Solidworks by now. Instead you get a mess that breaks all the time.
the biggest turn off of freecad to me was the usability. It felt clunky, and frankly, it didn’t give the ability to follow my normal work flow. definitly going to give this a try, thank you.
One body per sketch was always a deal breaker for me, so it’s good to hear that limitation is gone.
Do you know if sketches are still required to represent a single continuous face? For example, 3 concentric circles would not be allowed because it is ambiguous which parts are “surface” and which are “holes”. F360 doesn’t impose this limitation because it allows you to select individual sketch faces to move into 3D space, whereas FreeCAD considers that a single operation on the entire sketch.
FreeCAD does indeed perform a single operation on a given sketch, but I think the problem you’re encountering is the fact that FreeCAD cannot perform any operation to solidify a sketch that would result in more than one discontiguous solid.
You can, for example, totally extrude 3 concentric circles into a pad provided they intersect another solid surface that at the very least spans the gap between the edges of the circles. Your example in particular results in a cylinder with a hole in it, and another cylinder centered in that hole. The geometry is not actually ambiguous:
The above is just one sketch to create the rectangle, and then the other sketch is precisely what you described, three concentric circles of random diameter:
I did this in the bog standard 0.21 release, not the Realthunder fork, and with no other additions, mods, or workbenches.
FreeCAD cannot perform any operation to solidify a sketch that would result in more than one discontiguous solid.
Link can do this with a single sketch+pad (which is what I was referring to in the original post)
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I share your general sentiment about fusion. I’ve been avoiding FOSS CAD for the reasons you laid out, but I am somewhat tempted to give this a try. I wonder how well maintained it will be over time…
After I built my Voron I started using SuperSlicer, which is a fork of PrusaSlicer, which is itself a fork of Slic3r. SuperSlicer has some pretty nice features and I like the way it slices models, but it’s also a bit flakey at times. Going from GitHub activity, it’s only maintained by a single dev and they’re only able to work on the project sporadically every few months.
I also used SuperSlicer until I recently tried OrcaSlicer and was very impressed. The developer of SuperSlicer recently quit his job to work on it full time though, so I imagine it will start to catch up in features soon.
Thank you for sharing! Reading what you’ve found out, and seeing screenshot of your model really encourage me to give FreeCAD another try. I will install the fork. Thanks again!
If you are used to using F360 or SolidWorks, this is the version of FreeCAD you should be using. It doesn’t have the TNP problems that the main branch has. Of course, just like commercial CAD, it’s possible to break models by deleting references, and you’ll have to fix them. Experienced users of CAD know this is always possible.
I’ve been using RealThunder’s branch of FreeCAD for a few years and I’m able to do whatever I want, pretty much just like I do in SolidWorks in my day job. Most of my time is spent in the PartDesign workbench, which is really what most people designing for 3D printing should be using.
Remember that you’re using software built and maintained by volunteers. If you want constant improvement, you’re better off paying people whose sole job it is to work on the software. It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth paying for.
I’ve been spending this weekend learning FreeCAD as well. Although I have found it frustrating at times, I’ve felt like its mostly just very unforgiving about “bad design”. For example, freeCAD has been working best for me when I actually sketch every single element out. Every face, every cut, every pocket is part of a sketch and then a 1 step operation. If you design like that then FreeCAD is actually quite powerful, and I’m starting to like it.
I agree! It does enforce being clean and thoughtful about your design. But the inability to use a single sketch for more than one operation still bugs me. I loved being able to plan out and see all (or at least multiple) features in a single sketch in Fusion. In FreeCAD I can only figure out how to do this by making a master sketch and then projecting single features out to multiple other sketches, which works, but like everything in FreeCAD, just takes more time…
The only time I don’t use master sketches are either if there’s “too much” on top of each other or I’m importing a sketch to apply a logo (if I upload an STL or something, I’ll slap on a quick little logo somewhere unobtrusive so I’ll know if somebody runs with it to thingiverse or somewhere else. having that logo premade in a sketch makes it alot easier. just import and call it good.)
Forgive me for not using Linux, but I am not having any luck finding a download for Windows? I’ve seen the GitHub pages and they seem to send me in a semi-recursive wild-goose chase that I can’t make sense of.
Can some gentle soul point me to a Windows version? Maybe a direct download link to the ZIP or EXE? I am not very familiar with this, so any help is appreciated!
Ain’t it this? Random Lemmy stranger, but this seems to be what you want. It might require you to have Python 3.8, but then again, I know nothing of the program and only reply becase no one did yet. https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD/releases/download/Tip/FreeCAD-Link-Tip-Win-x86_64-py3.8-20231102.7z
I’m excited to try this, ive been looking for fusion alternatives, i cant stand the cloud based bs. Thanks for the suggestion! We all need to move away from cloud based and subscription based software.
