FreeCAD For Beginners p.1 - UI, Sketching, Constraints, Extruding, and 3D Printing

all right welcome back to another video i hope you're all doing well and today i've got something a little bit different what i'm going to be doing is showing you the basics of free cad so following the recent changes to fusion 360's license i've had a lot of messages asking me what card package they should use and which ones are the easiest and those kind of things so my answer to that is free cad i'm going to go through and show you the basics of the environment how to use the ui how to set up a new project we're going to look at sketching extruding cutting filleting and finally i'm going to show you how you can extrude for 3d printing so let's get straight into it first of all this is where you can download free card it's totally open source and it's supported for windows mac and linux so make sure you go and download and install whichever version you need if you haven't already one other thing i quickly want to show you is this really useful free card wiki if you've got any questions about freecad or any of the features everything you need to know is here it tells you how to use all the tools what they're for and i 100 recommend you take a look at this page so once you open free card you're going to be greeted with something like this and the first thing we want to do is create a new design so we're going to click here click this big plus button and it takes us to this new empty workspace the first thing worth mentioning here are the different workspaces available to you if we come up to the top here click this drop down we have all these different workspaces available to us and if you're just looking to design parts for 3d printing nine times out of ten what you'll be sticking to are the part design workspace and the sketcher workspace chances are you won't really use more than that so for this tutorial the first thing we're going to do is switch to the path design workspace as that's where you're going to spend most of your time before we do anything else go up to edit come down to preferences this will open up a new window and you'll see we'll have different tabs you can click on here we're just going to look at general and come over to units and this is where you're going to set up whichever units you're comfortable using if you click the drop down you can see there's a ton of stuff in there you've got imperial metric and a bunch of others i'm just going to click standard i'm going to be using millimeters because that's what i like to use if you've come from another cad package you might also want to have a look at the display options you can select 3d navigation you can choose controls from other packages like blender revit there's so many different sets in here you can play around with i recommend having a look at them and adjusting them to your needs if necessary once you're done hit ok and we're back to our part design workspace now notice when we change workspaces we get a bunch of different tools available to us so if we go back to the start workspace again notice how this toolbar changes at the top and this is really important because you need to get into the mindset that each workspace has different tools and you want to use them at different times so we're going to click the drop down we're going to come in to part design and you'll see in here we have a bunch of different tools and a lot of these tools are for 3d surfaces let's go back to part design and start our first sketch so click the drop down part design we're back in here if we take a look on the left we've got these two tabs here we've got model and tasks if we click on model this is our component tree and if you've come from something like fusion 360 or whether this is really new to you i think you're going to be able to pick it up really easily notice in here we've got our application and it just says unnamed what we need to do to change this is save our projects locally and unlike other card packages this is not cloud-based you own all your files you'll always keep them and i think that's awesome so what we're going to do is come up to file save choose a directory and i'm just going to give it a name i'm going to call it tutorial and hit save once you've done that you'll see your application name change now we're good to start modeling so before you start modeling anything the first thing we need to do is create a body each part is going to be its own body up on the toolbar here you'll see an icon create a new body and make it active create a new body so you want to click this once once you've done that notice on the component tree we've now got a new body in there with an origin and notice the origin is kind of grayed out and you can't really see it so if you click the origin and hit space on your keyboard that shows and hides things inside a freecad so that's really useful feature to know as well we're going to leave it hidden for now because we don't really need to see it now it's time to create our first sketch so to do that up on the menu here at the top you'll see this icon and that is how you create a new sketch we want to click that once and notice now it's asking us to select a plane now there are three different planes available to us but right now we can only see one so now i can show you how you can move around and navigate your way around the workspace so if you click the middle mouse wheel and just drag around you'll see you can pan around the environment but what is really handy to know is if you press shift and your right mouse button that's how you rotate around and now you can see those three different planes in here and we need to select one of them to sketch on me personally i like sketching top down so what i'm going to do is select this x y plane so i'm going to select this plane or you can click it on the left once you've selected whichever one you want to use click ok that'll give us a new sketch and now we can start designing and sketching whatever we want on here if we hit shift and the right mouse button again you can see we're rotating around and say for example we were rotating it and we can't quite get it back to that flat view that we like so notice up on the top right we've got this little cube and this little cube makes it really easy for you to change the perspective on your design so if we want to go back to that perfect top down view hover over the square click top and that'll take you straight back to that top down view you can also change it so if you click one of the arrows you can you know nicely change that and get different perspectives but we want to keep top down view because that's the way i like to use it you can also do this here on the top left you have a bunch of shortcuts you can set the front view set to top view there's a couple of ways of doing it but i think that's something you really do need to know now that we're in our sketch we're going to create a square and you can easily create a square using the square or the rectangle tool but we're not going to do that here because i want to talk to you about constraints and just how important they are so what we're going to do instead is create four lines and then we're going to use constraints to bring those lines together to create a square so if we go up on the toolbar click on the line tool if you click anywhere and move your mouse across and click again you create a line in this case i'm not going to do them straight because i want to show you the constraints if we click again and create the other lines nice and simple and there we go we now have four lines obviously that doesn't look like a very good square but we're going to fix that using constraints the first constraint we're going to look at is something called a coincident a lot of people skip over constraints and they like to take shortcuts but that is not the correct way to do it constraints are extremely important and they tend to always be the same in any card package and if you can understand constraints and master this 2d workspace then the 3d stuff really just becomes easy and i promise you that so what are constraints constraints are basically a set of rules for your designs to follow and as i said they're the same in almost all card packages so if you're able to master them you can jump between card packages really really easily let's go up to the constraints menu here and you'll see them towards the right and the first one we've got here is a coincidence so we're going to click a coincident constraint so what does this do basically a coincident constraint allows us to select two points so let's go and do that we'll click this point here and this point here and watch what happens they join together they become coincident so coincident joins two points to a single point and that's important to remember we can now do the same for all the other lines so we're going to go ahead and do that if we click this one and this one they join together if we click this one and this one they become coincident same for this one click click they become coincident now our sketch is starting to look somewhat more like a square it's not the best square i've ever seen but we're going to fix that in a sec so now that we've done our coincident constraint we can look at some of the other constraints and if you look at your sketch you're probably wondering what these little lines are here so these are constraints because these were created as straight lines freecad already knows that this is a perfectly vertical line and therefore applies a constraint automatically and let's see what happens if we grab this point here and try and drag it around notice what happens these lines here that are horizontal are adjusting and becoming diagonal but the vertical line is staying perfectly straight and that's because we have that constraint on it if we click this little line and delete we've now removed that constraint and watch what happens when we drag this corner you can see now they're both going diagonal so you can see that constraints are just rules that the design is following we can re-add that constraint back in using a vertical constraint here so up again on the constraints menu come to the vertical constraint which is going to be this line here we're going to click that once you want to select which line you want to apply it to we're going to click this one and notice now that little symbol has appeared back there if we try and drag the corner again it's obeying the rule that we've given it now because we're creating a square we need to apply horizontal constraints as well to these lines so the next constraint over is a horizontal one so if we click that we can now click on these horizontal lines so we've made that straight and we've made that straight so design is now following these constraints and if we click and drag the corner now the lines are staying straight but we're still able to move it and adjust these dimensions and that's not good either so what can we do about that well a lot of people will say right i've got a square i'm happy with this i'm going to go and extrude it bad idea never do that in any card package we always need to tell the card package about position and dimension and currently we've done neither we've set up our constraints but freecat doesn't know where the square is in relation to the origin of this workspace and the origin of the workspace is always the center point so you can see in the middle of this grid we've got this little red circle that's the center point freecad knows what exactly where that is so it makes sense that when we design something else we always reference that center point we need to give it a length so that we can't just freely adjust it like this again we can use constraints to do that so up on the constraints toolbar there's a constraint here called fix the horizontal distance between two points so if we click this we look at one of our horizontal lines in this case the top one we select our first point and our second point and it's asking us to enter a length so i'm going to make this 50 millimeters hit ok and notice it adjusts it for us we can do the exact same for the vertical lines so again on the constraints menu this time we're going to come to the next one over fix the vertical distance between two points on line ends we're gonna click that one we'll use the line on the right here we'll click the top point the bottom point it's gonna ask us for another length we'll put in 50 mil okay and there we go we now have a square one thing about these dimensions is that they can sometimes get in the way it can be quite obstructive on your design but you can easily move them just by clicking and dragging and you can place them on the outside of wherever you're sketching and that's typically what i like to do another thing that's useful to know is that if you've got a constraint selected and you see the little icon next to your cursor if you hit escape on the keyboard you'll deselect that and you'll be back to your regular cursor again if we try and move this around notice we're moving the square around but we're not changing this dimensions and that's because we've set up those constraints the last thing we need to do is tell freecad about position it needs to know where the square is in the position of the sketch and as i said before we always use the center point as a reference so we can once again use these dimension tools so we're going to go up to the horizontal distance constraint but this time we're going to select the center point that i talked about so that's going to be our first point and our second point is going to be one of the corners and i'm going to go for this bottom right corner and notice again it's asking us for a length so i'm going to put in 25 mil because i want to be dead center so i'm going to hit ok and that is now centered horizontally and just to prove it if i hit escape again and we try and move this around notice i can move it vertically but horizontally it's fixed because i've told it it has to be 25 mil from the center point again we can move this out of the way move it down underneath and it looks a lot cleaner we're going to add in the final one so we're going to go up to our vertical distance constraint select our center point i'm going to select the top left corner and this time again 25 millimeters and i'm going to hit ok and there we go you can see our square turns green which means we've given it all the constraints and free card knows about position and dimension so we're now done in the sketch workspace and we can close it so in order to do that we can just click update and click close and that'll take you right back to the part design workspace and notice again the tools at the top here have changed and remember that does happen as you change between different workspaces in the center of the screen we can see the sketch that we just created and remember we can pan around and rotate and do all that cool stuff so in our component tree on sketch we're going to right click rename we're going to call it square we're now ready to extrude and create our first 3d object so select your sketch here on the component tree cut up to the toolbar and we want to click on this first yellow icon called pad padding is the same as extruding it just has a slightly different name so we're going to click on that once and notice how that extrudes our 2d sketch into a 3d object and we are going to give it a length i want it to be a cube in this case so i'm going to make this 50 mil and hit okay we've now got our first 3d object how cool is that again if you pay attention to the component tree we can click this drop down on pad we're going to rename pad so we're going to right click on pad rename and call it q now let's say for example you've extruded and you think i want to make a change i want to change the dimension if you want to do that it's super easy just come up to the square sketch and double click that will take you straight back to the sketcher workspace and say for example you want to change this 50 millimeters to 60 millimeters just double click on the dimension it'll ask you to change it enter in a new value hit ok and it'll update for you and it's that simple remember we can close and leave this workspace just hit update close we're back into our part design workspace now what i'm going to do is create a circular pocket on the very top of this cube and to do that we're going to have to create a new sketch now to create a sketch on the surface of an object you first have to click on that surface so i'm going to click on this very top surface here and then we're going to come up to the tool menu and click on create a new sketch that takes us straight to this view we go to our top down view and remember if you hold shift and right click you can rotate around if you hold the middle mouse button you can pan around and if you want to return to that top tone view click the top button on that little cube in the top right and boom you're straight back here first thing we're going to do here is create a circle and up on the 2d sketch menu this fourth icon across will let us create a circle so we're going to click on that once click anywhere on the screen drag outwards and click again and that lets you create a circle we escape we deselect the circle tool notice again if we click on the edge of the circle we can adjust its diameter and we don't want to do that remember it's bad you need to specify the rules and tell freecad about your dimensions and positions so for this we're going to add another constraint if we come up to the constraints menu again on the far right you will see constrain an arc or a circle if you can't quite see it notice there's two little arrows here if you click those you can select additional constraints we're going to select that tool click on the edge of our circle and it's going to ask us for a diameter i'm going to enter 12.5 mil hit ok and there we go it's adjusted it for us so we've just told it about our dimension we now need to tell about our position and with a circle we only really have one point of reference which is the center of the circle and remember earlier i talked about the center point of our workspace which is this point right in the middle and remember we have a coincident tool that brings two points together so we can use coincident for this particular case if we go up and grab the coincident tool if we click on our center point and then the center of our circle they'll snap together you'll see it turn green and freecad is now happy it knows where the circle is it knows the diameter of the circle all things are good if we try and move or adjust the circle by clicking and dragging notice it's not going anywhere it's staying exactly in the middle again we're done in this workspace so we can update on the left and close and we come back to our part design workspace we're going to rename our sketch so we'll come here rename we'll call it circle hit enter and now we're ready to create that pocket just like before we have to select the sketch that we're going to use so we're going to select circle up on the menu now next to the yellow tools you see this little blue one it's called pocket we're going to click that and create a pocket and notice what it's done is it's created a cut into that cube and again we can set a length for this so i'm going to set it to be 12.5 and hit ok and there we go we've now got a cube with a pocket cut into it and that looks pretty cool so just to make this look a little bit fancier what we can do is round off these corners and we're going to do that using a tool called the filler tool you'll see the fillet tool up here on the menu which is this one and it says make a fillet on an edge face or body and what i will say as well is that if you want to find out what all these tools do just hover over each one and it'll give you a brief description and then if you want to learn more you can use that wiki have a look at the tool on the wiki and it'll tell you what you can use it for so in order to use the fill tool we first have to select edges so we're going to select the four corners of this cube now it's important that you hold down control when you click each one otherwise you only select one at a time so you want to hold ctrl click each edge and remember you can rotate around using shift and right click so we're going to select each edge we're now going to go up to the fillet tool click that once i notice it's rounded those edges off and on the left we can set a radius so i'm going to try maybe 10 mil i'm really happy with that so i'm going to hit ok and there we go we've rounded the edges on our cube and i think it looks great for our first 3d model you can pretty much use the fill up tool on any surface i can use on the edge of the circle for example so just to show you if i click the edge of the circle come up to fill it you can use it there also so we could try something like 2.5 and hit ok and there we go we've rounded off the edge of that circle as well and that's basically it that's all there is to it if you've come from another card package you'll probably be familiar with a lot of the things i'm saying because it does cross over between all of them it's always the same process where you go through you create a sketch you translate the sketch into the 3d workspace and it's just this iterative process over and over again that's as far as i'm going to go in this tutorial in terms of design but i am going to follow this video up with kind of like a mini course where i go through a lot of other features in freecad i really hope a lot of you are going to find that useful so i'll do now is show you quickly how you can take something you've designed export it as an stl so that you can 3d print it it's really really straightforward so what you have to do first is select the part that you want to print so in this case we're going to select this body the whole thing we're going to come up to file export and you select the directory where you want the file to be i'm going to call this tutorial click on the drop down where it says save as type you want to find stl mesh and it's worth highlighting here as well just how many different file types you have available there's even some autodesk stuff in here you've got step files loads and loads of stuff that's really useful but as i said we want to select stl mesh i'm going to hit save and that saves that out for us and just to show you if i open proofs of slicer i add a part i'm going to select the part we just made there it is on our heat bed i'm going to hit slice and that's it it's that simple that is now ready to be 3d printed i hope you found this really really useful my my goal as always is to encourage and get as many people involved in cad as possible i believe that by teaching a lot of this free cad stuff i'm definitely going to be able to do that so i hope you really do appreciate it if you want to see more videos like this make sure you subscribe as i said i'm going to follow this up with a lot more tutorials if you want to request a tutorial leave a comment below as always thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: thehardwareguy

Views: 206,602

Rating: 4.9707108 out of 5

Keywords: freecad, freecad tutorials for beginners, freecad tutorial, freecad 0.18 tutorial, freecad part design tutorial, freecad sketcher tutorial, freecad 3d printing, freecad vs fusion 360, free cad software, free cad software for 3d printing, free cad, free cad 0.18, fusion 360 to freecad, fusion 360 license change, fusion 360 alternatives, fusion 360 alternatives free, cad beginner course, cad beginner tutorial, beginner cad software, cad beginner, freecad 2021, freecad 2022

Id: uh5aN_Di8J0

Length: 21min 44sec (1304 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SaltySpectrum]

Thanks! Fusion is already a pain to try and learn since I’m only using it for hobby stuff and don’t have the time to dedicate to it. And since they’ve decided to start locking down on more and more features for the personal version and will probably continue to do so, I’ve been seriously interested in finding something else. I understand that Autodesk wants to make a profit, but paying for a subscription for software that will never pay me back due to the fact I’m only using it for hobby purposes is not really feasible.

[u/Riknarr]

I'll be taking a look at this, I've been needing to get into starting to do a bit of design and was actually thinking about using freecad. So thank you very much

[u/Erwins-Cat]

Take my virtual badge since I'm a cheapo. I'm a long time user of FreeCAD and also using it in my job. The has some pros and cons compared to other low entry CAD programs, but the biggest plus is that it is not phoning home, works on all platforms and the some of the optional add-ons are really great.

[u/liquidpoopcorn]

the flow of it needs to be worked on/be more streamlined.

outside of that, if you have any experience with fusion/solidworks/autocad/others its not that hard to learn by hand, with a few googles here and there.

its just a pain that with other software you can do pretty easily sketch->extrude, but on here its a whole process you need to follow.

though i hope it will be looked it as it progresses. its still pretty good software for the early version it is on.

[u/1m0PRndKVptaV8I72xbT]

Does freeCad have parameter support? Changing your cube would have been pretty involved without being able to use variables.

[u/mecheng70]

Have you looked at onshape.com? Free, browser based...

[u/Dr_Bunsen_Burns]

I tried freecad a few years back, I was overwhelmed compared to other CAD programs. I will save the post and check back.