TP is essential.
I finally realised how freecad wants me to use it and found it much nicer to work with after that
Exactly this - once people invest the time to understand the FreeCAD flow, and get over it, they’ll find it’s an amazing and extremely productive tool.
I tried out SolidWorks and it’s a complete mess. You can’t just download and install it, it runs a bunch of weird background programs on the computer, and interacting with the multiple web sites is a nightmare. I’ve been waiting well over a month for them to refund under the promised 30 day guarantee. I’d never, ever do anything with that awful company again.
I’m really looking forward to see how Ondsel does. I’ve been using it for the last week or two, as it’s integrated 0.22 features, and I think it could be a really good thing for the FreeCAD community.
Oh yeah solidworks connected is a right pain, I use it purely because of my experience with solidworks itself, familiarity goes a long way especially when it’s been a while. Ondsel is what I’ve been using, grabbed it on a whim after it was recommended a few weeks ago. The fact it’s done by a bunch of freecad contributors is interesting to me, and not that I need then but the collab tools look interesting.
Wrt to the workflow it’s funny because it’s the way I wanted to use it, it totally behaves like other cad packages. I’m definitely sketch first for everything, I just was using the part workbench instead of the PartDesign workbench. I actually really like how freecad handles variables through the spreadsheet, put together the start of some parametric gears for a project idea I have.
I’ve found the same thing with regard to workflow - I find it really weird when people say it’s nothing like any other CAD programs, because it really is. You start with sketches and build up from there. Yes, the spreadsheet feature is amazing! I couldn’t believe SolidWorks forces you to buy Excel to do the same thing, which is crazy. The spreadsheet integration in FreeCAD is great - with the macro that handles the reference labels.
At my rather beginner level, designing single parts for a 3D printer or laser engraver, it behaves almost exactly like most other parametric-history CAD apps in the broad concepts. The devil is just in the details, really. Shortcuts are different, terminology is different, Certain QoL and UI elements are either missing or somewhere else. The workbench model is not unique, but some of the kruft that has built up around FreeCAD’s benches and the defaults (better in recent versions if you look at the start screen) can make a new user “nope out” if they have other options. I guess assemblies in particular remain a fragmented area and lag behind the commercial packages, and I can say for certain that it still requires “good design practices” in a way that some of the commercial apps manage around, toponaming the biggest among them.
If all the negatives kill your workflow to the point that you want to pay for commercial software or live with the limitations (current and potential) of their free tiers, then that’s absolutely understandable. Commercially, it’s doubly so, and with addition of the “business reality” that there’s also no one to blame or sue if FreeCAD is not working for you. Hell, I don’t use it for all my stuff either, as I find no-history modeling still mostly works for what I’m doing and I have some free or cheap options in that space that are decent, but I can see the appeal as I’m starting to make things that could benefit from tweaks after the fact. What I get frustrated by is claims that FreeCAD “is no good” or “will never be useful”. I call BS. It’s already good and useful for many use cases, and anyway the number of free parametric CAD suites that do not restrict your use of your designs is exactly ONE. Otherwise, you’re looking at an absolute minimum of $300 a year to subscribe and hope that Shapr3D’s new history functionality doesn’t break, and that neither they nor Alibre gets gobbled up.
