Apparently Ondsel recently announced they’re shutting down, partially due to this release. A lot of what Ondsel added to the FreeCAD experience is just merged into FreeCAD now. Sad to see it but at least all their work wasn’t for nothing.
Ooh! Time to give it another look.
tbh… I like it more than OnShape, but I also just use it as a hobby for 3dprinting.
It’s still… Difficult if you’re used to commercial CAD suites, but it’s leagues better than it used to be
freecad is actually getting fucking good for the price
I kinda want to try it out just as a hobby, is it decent or should I look elsewhere?
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.
I’m familiar with sketchup, I’ll give it a shot this weekend!
Seems like a lot of great changes
Rip Ondsel, made great changes before it died.
most of them are merged in FC, and they will still continue contributing.
Great news
Glad to hear! I was using it already from time to time.
Does it support 3D mice?
Awesome!!
I guess Ill give it another look. Onshapes licensing is not compatible with my 3d printing side-gig, and Fusion360, although it has a very fairly priced startup license, requires me to run a Windows VM
Last time i tried it was crashing a bit. I am excited to try again, it’s such a needed tool
I have tried freecad a number of times to replace solidworks as a critical piece of closed source software in hardware development toolchains. I have always struggled. Yesterday someone spent an hour with me at a makespace saying… “FreeCAD has a different way of doing this/try realthunder branch/use symmetry condition/delete all conditions that coincide” … it has been worth years of trying alone. When I started solidworks the reseller gave me a week of training - this is often why complex FOSS software gets a reputation for being clunky, because alone you will spend ages hunting a GUI button in a complex interface.
TLDR: Go outside, go to makespace or a FREECAD conference - meet other people who use open source software - its much easier to use/learn from others than alone.
The best thing about 1.0 is that it has ported most fo the topalogical fixes from realthunder!