Hi! I started to fiddle around with freecad a little again tonight. I still find many things unintuitive. And I just watched a video about master sketches, because they are essential in my workflow on other programs. It makes it soo much easier to keep the overview and change little things quickly because I don’t have to search for the responsible sketch.
In this video the person demonstrates at around 9:15 how to use the master sketch as a reference in the sub bodies. I can get used to only get one body from a sketch, but man, how many steps does it take to just reference a sketch?! You even need to use a differen workbech, use the clone tool, but not this one and then drag and drop the duplicate into the same body you are working on? Why?! I mean the sketch is right there, just let me click it!!
This got me wondering it those rough workflows are just designed badly or if this is a limitation of the engine or whstevery it’s called, that freecad is based on? Because in my limited programming mind it does not make a difference what file is referenced. If it is some file on a directory above, just use something like “./” Before to go up one directory.
And I think those little things that just work in other cad software, makes freecad so much less approcavhabel and so much harder to jump in.
If I want to make a complicated part, that is not just a box with a hole, I don’t want to Google around until I found a solution, I want the intuitive solution to work without 3 extra steps. This just hinders my design process a lot.
Maybe someone knows how freecad works on the background and can explain why freecad works like that.
Thanks!
Every CAD program has buttons for functions you may never use for the types of objects you design. A lot of commercial CAD has taken the approach of defaulting to a basic limited set of buttons that most people use. You can usually customize the interface to add any extra functionality you need. FreeCAD puts everything out there by default and you also have the option to customize to your needs. How can they possibly know what you need? As soon as they leave something out, they’ll be crucified for it. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
With respect to tutorials “droning on about useless shit”, I’ll bet there are a lot of fundamentals being explained that are critical to understanding typical CAD workflows. It’s not just FreeCAD. These same fundamentals apply to SolidWorks, Creo, Onshape, F360, etc… It’s all generally the same.
The people that I see complain about FreeCAD often say they have no experience and that it’s because FreeCAD is somehow bad. I use SolidWorks every day at work and I use FreeCAD at home. I had no trouble learning FreeCAD because the modeling methods are the same. All CAD shares some common problems that you learn to avoid by experience. However, you need to learn the basics and make some mistakes to get good at it.
Many people start with intensely complex parts and get upset when they can’t make what they want. Practice with easy parts and experiment with different methods. Often, there is more than one way to make something in CAD. Some might be better than others, but it’s situationally dependent.
Learn the basics, practice, and keep learning and you’ll be fine regardless of what CAD you use.