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.
Agreed: The Dune3D developers made the wise decision to start from scratch implementing a parametric modeling UI. Extremely robust software; very fast, and almost intuitive (high praise for CAD).
The problem with FreeCAD, on the other hand, is that it's a "just two more weeks and it'll be great" solution.
The developers are clearly talented in a raw-math kind of way, but FreeCAD offers the eternal promise of usability in the next release; while never delivering it.
Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.
This would perfectly explain why the FreeCAD experience is so consistently bizarre.
>Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.
If you've been around on the FreeCAD forums, you'll see that the majority of users essentially believe that all comparisons of FreeCAD with commercial CAD software is illegitimate and become incredibly defensive. They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.
It's like they've got the Steve Jobs attitude but without the good taste that justified it.
>They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.
Exactly. These FreeCAD "strategies" you mention align themselves perfectly with the objectives of the legacy CAD industry: To delay; break; and obfuscate opensource CAD.
In other words: The FreeCAD team may not be infiltrated by the legacy-CAD industry, but its behavior is entirely consistent with such a state.
One solution is to fork the behemoth; but if FreeCAD is a hedge-maze-by-design, the only way to win is not to play the game: Build alternatives elsewhere, from scratch.
FreeCAD feels like a time-drainer honeypot. Though whether by accident, or malice, is unknown.
Meh, if you gauge FreeCAD development mindset off of the forums you are misleading yourself. That was certainly the case 3 or 4 years ago, but it would seem that the core contributors have mostly moved away from the forum as a platform due to the very toxic mentality you mention. GitHub is the most concrete view into things, and a lot of free-flowing discussion happens on Discord.
The mindset against usability improvements that was prevalent back then has largely shifted. The hard part is the complexity of the program makes a single sweeping overhaul incredibly unlikely so incremental jumps and improvements will probably continue. Seems to me like things are headed in a pretty healthy direction when comparing the last few versions.
This. I just can’t bring myself to use FreeCAD for anything. It’s been almost a decade of occasional attempts during vacation breaks and it is still one of the worst, most counter-intuitive pieces of 3D software I’ve ever used (and I paid my way through college doing early multimedia work, some 30 years ago).
I was excited about dune3d but one of the things I needed to do I had to import an SVG as a path to extrude (or similar) and I couldn't see a way to do it.
I managed to do it (painfully) with freecad, so that's what I settled with.
Solvespace is nice, but missing fillets and chamfers is kind of a deal-breaker. Last time I tried it it also had issues with small holes turning into diamonds.
That said, pre-1.0 FreeCAD had a terrible UX so it was the best FOSS CAD option.
With the 1.0 release of FreeCAD the UX is much better though. There are still a few WTFs (e.g. it took me quite a while to figure out rollback is done via right-click->set tip, or something like that)... But overall it's better than Solvespace now.
Set tip makes sense if you think of the steps taken to build up a parts as a history. Setting the tip isn't a rollback. It is saying "I want to insert a new step in the history".
Yeah I actually have. I really liked the concept, but I designed a cylinder with many holes (think a robust sieve) and it just crashed when the number of holes grew too great. Even the OpenCL/MP version. I felt it being unstable in other ways too so I did not make it my go to tool. Sadly it also seems it's not being developed much.
EDIT: Missing fillets and chamfers we're also a big problem for me - probably I'm just a newbie maker and want unreasonable things, but still.
