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FreeCAD
I will try the newer version again. Last I tried 2 years or so back, it was crashing for me.

Personal Context: I am a civil enginer, and our requirement from CAD softwares are a lot simpler than Mechanical Engineering. Here on HN, whenever I see people discussing CAD, its the mechanical version of parts and 3d printing.

Shameless Plug: I have decided to try building my own! Over a long enough timeline, it is doable, including the UI/UX part.

https://mv.ramshanker.in/

I'm a occasional hobbyist maker and i've used Autodesk Fusion, Solid Edge, OpenSCAD and other niche parametric programs, but always felt FreeCAD was too complex. But I really wanted it to work for me because it's FOSS and 100% offline. So with the new FreeCAD 1.1 RC I found an hour long tutorial and dove in. (1.1 is supposedly much easier to work with)

After doing the tut I can say that 1.1 is very nice, i can uninstall Fusion and Solid Edge finally :)

The guide i followed, no relation to it whatsoverer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxxDahY1U6E

  • elaus
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  • 57 minutes ago
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I too feel like the latest versions are quite a big improvement and I finally lost that feeling of slowing myself down just for the sake of using OSS.

But I still hope for a "blender moment" where a concerted effort gets rid of old cruft, improves UI/UX and jump-starts growth (also in developers/funding) and further improvements.

Have you tried SolveSpace? It's easily my favorite open source CAD program. The main things it's missing are shells, fillets, and chamfers. But I've been able to 3D print quite a few parts using it!
You might want to check out Dune3D. It advertises itself as combining the constraint solver from SolveSpace with a OpenCASCADE geometry kernel supporting fillets and chamfers. :)

Haven't used it much apart from some minor tests (I tend to prefer MoI3D, but that's in a different category in several ways...), but as far as FOSS solid modelers it seems like the most promising to me. I do remember some small UI quirks, but overall it felt very approachable and streamlined, and looking at the GitHub repo, development is active. FreeCAD IMHO is just too sprawling and complex, with seemingly little tought paid to UI/UX.

I can never leave Solid Edge. Synchronous editing is simply the best for 3d printing and fast iteration when you're experimenting with designs.
Similar experience. I tried to learn FreeCAD a while ago. People recommended Mango Jelly's tutorials. I used those among others and dove in. However, it was a pretty frustrating experience. Things never worked quite right. I would drill into a certain point and then realized you couldn't get there from here, and had to start over.

I recently had a desperate need to 3D print a part and tried FreeCAD again. A couple of things changed: 1) 1.1 came out and 2) Mango Jelly created a playlist that essentially was "bare bones what you need to know to get started." It was slightly over an hour of the fundamentals of navigating and just enough tools.

I think FreeCAD was basically just way too buggy initially, especially on macOS. Things never worked like tutorials said, or even dot updates sometimes broke what was being taught in tutorials. Also, while great, MJ's other previous videos deep dove into specific tools. Over half of any particular video would discuss features that helped you become an expert, but overwhelming when it came to getting up and running.

Since then, I've felt much more confident about FreeCAD and have used it to knock out other pieces.

I feel CAD is one area where open source does not shine. The problem space is too complex, and the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development driven from customer demands rather than developers scratching their own itches.

Not least there are free (as in beer) solutions available, like fusion 360, that are enormously capable.

Theres certainly a place for open source, and openscad would be a great tool to reach for for procedurally generated models. But in all honesty, Freecad doesn't compare well to the professional tools in this space - not in the way that say, gimp does to its commercial competitors.

fusion 360 is exactly "free" for that reason, to make people reason like you do. They do not want a blender moment.
> the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development

The current AutoCAD GUI is essentially unchanged from the 80s, so this shouldn't really be much of an issue. They added a ribbon probably 15 years ago at this point, but I can't think of any other major/recent changes. (But maybe there are some changes that I'm not familiar with, since I don't use AutoCAD very often and only started using it relatively recently)

I never understood this UI problem.

Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.

There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it. On the other hand, a single developer, in javascript, made a copy of photoshop, and most people I know prefer to use that over GIMP...

Just copy the UI that works, if you can't research your own UI.

I don’t know, I tried FreeCAD a few months ago and it was buggy as hell. I did some really basic extrusions and distance constraints. But ended up with non-perpendicular entities despite not constructing it like this.
  • ghayes
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I’ve really enjoyed Shapr3D (built on Parasolid). Nothing particularly better than the usual competitors but the interface is really intuitive and you can realistically develop on an iPad. Curious if anyone else has had experiences with it.
I only used it for some hobby modeling, but I have to say it's fantastic and very impressive.

It seems like it's fully community-maintained, there is no big company or foundation behind it. Honestly it's hard to believe!

There was just one major problem, the infamous "topological naming problem" which caused issues downstream is you edited a non-leaf node. That was pretty frustrating to deal with, but in later releases they fixed it I think. (Have not tried it since because I didn't have anything to model)

A very powerful feature of FreeCAD is its Python console. It is very useful when debugging software that uses/produces 3D solids. With it I was able to:

- colorise solid faces with random colors

- colorise faces by type (cylinder, plane, etc.)

- add 3D labels in the scene

Spent hours and hours learning how to use it to draw a part. Got it done, but then didn't use it for a long time. Next time, couldn't remember how.

Finding Cadquery less of a hurdle for casual use. Wish I could run it from Termux though.

I used it once or twice to open an existing .step file just to know if I was exporting it correctly from KiCad.

Speaking of KiCad, I am convincing lots of people to move from EAGLE to it now that EAGLE is about to be killed by AutoDesk, and everyone seem to be having a good time.

I am hoping FreeCAD can become good to the point I can convince people to move to it too.

  • devmor
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  • 51 minutes ago
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KiCad is frustrating because it’s actually good enough to make a lot of models but it’s just unfriendly enough to make it take way too long to do… but it’s also still way easier than learning how to do it in a full-featured cad program.

I would kill for something like KiCad with more refined controls.

Cadquery looks interesting. In particular STEP support compared to OpenSCAD. Thanks for mentioning.
Try Build123d! It is just a joy to work with.
FreeCAD is not great, it's painful to use but it's free and it works. I'm thankful for it.
I really want to support open-source CAD, but it's so hard to take FreeCAD seriously. It reminds me of POV-Ray, which was (and still is) a parametric raytracer. An impressive feat of engineering completely derailed by the choice of a "UI" paradigm that made the simplest things unreasonably hard.

Designing 3D parts is hard enough, and while parametric modeling has uses... come on.

I'm pretty happy with build123d these days https://github.com/gumyr/build123d
Yep. I am doing all my CAD work with build123d. I think it is much more capable than OpenSCAD due to BREP and Python. A shame that it is still relatively unknown.
In a space that's being taken over by cloud shit where you have no privacy, FreeCAD is one of the last good CAD engineering tools left, let alone being FOSS.
Few points that I've not seen being factored in over the past decade-

* This needs a better renderer in today's day & age

* Need cross-device/web support

* Topology Optimization w/ pure physics code

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Hopefully LLMs can work on forking this or adding better features with AI-assists