Was I unfair to FreeCAD?

this is freead in a recent video I talked about free CAD programs you can use for your 3D printing Endeavors and in that video I said that freead just wasn't worth learning there was too many issues with it too many bugs and I wouldn't waste your time with it and well did that upset a lot of people instead I suggested onzo which is built on freead but it has additional UI improvements and Cloud capability with a subscription service if you wanted to use something like that but I'll be completely honest I might have been too quick to dismiss freecad because it's been several years since I've made a genuine effort to use fread for a project and it turns out that the dev version is very different to the stable release that I was trying to use that is on the main website but the question is was I unfair to freead so to answer this once and for all I'm going to use freead to design an antweight combat robot chassis I'm going to take along for the journey we'll laugh we'll cry I might throw a chair across the room but we'll find out once and for all if you should learn this or just stick with some other free Alternatives out there let's get started expic to kick things off I need to mention something I wasn't aware of and that's that the version that's on the freead website the stable release is quite a far way behind the nightly builds that are listed on GitHub now you can't expect a beginner to then look through GitHub to download an unstable nightly build you get latest features I don't think that's reasonable so you know downloading the stable version is something that most people would do but I am going to go to the weekly builds of uh freead and I've downloaded this version which is. 22 development version It's the latest bleeding edge freead I could get and I've configured it to a dark mode and this is where the first weirdness of freead starts to creep in because here in preferences you can change the theme I'm not a fan of the very old-fashioned original fread theme I like my software to be in dark mode where possible but if you look in the theme there's many dark modes we have dark dark behave dark contrast dark modern darker Pro dark um and they all have their pros and cons some of them work better with the UI some of them have text that's more visible and I haven't found one Within These themes that is perfect in every circum St that is one reason I liked onzo because the UI just felt really well polished everything was easily visible easy to see and read no matter what you did in the in the software with these themes none of them feels perfect yet I've stuck with prod dark but you may have other preferences and again this is how open source software works I would say that like a person or a team of people have worked on each of these themes in uh like isolation and then they put it into the software and that's how you end up with stuff like this so I'm just sticking with product and this is the UI for the .22 development version of fread and this is what you're greeted with once you have the product theme in the latest version of freecad of time of recording and yet you guys were correct it is very different to the stable release uh you have these different options to go straight into making a part or an assembly or a drawing so I'm going to click parametric part and yeah it does look a lot better I can clearly see a lot of efforts being done to make the interface as userfriendly as possible and you can see on the right hand side here it does guide you what to do next so create sketch is what I want to do before I then do something with it with a feature to do something to it so I'm going to click create sketch and then from here I can click which plane I want to put that sketch on now what I also do like is I can change how I navigate through the software at the bottom right here you can see different Navigation defaults uh depending on the software you might be used to so I've actually done Tinker CAD which I quite like so that's where you you uh can pan by pushing the mouse wheel down right click to uh orbit around the object like that and scroll in with the mouse wheel scroll out like that so I find it very easy to navigate around but also on the top right here you can select where the default view you want it so for my sketch I'm going to select the XY plane like that and then now we're brought into our sketch workflow and this is also something that I can see has been dramatically improved from much earlier versions of freead that I used to use and it does feel quite similar to what I'm used to in something like Fusion but I think onzo again has done a little bit of a better job making it uh more of an easy transition but it's still very usable so for example you can right click and you can select what uh geometry you want to create so for example polyline so the the actual hotkey for this is going to be G and then M and I actually got used to this very quickly so you just go GM like that or you know GL like that for a line um and you can easily go between the different geometry just by doing that and then when you want to Dimension it you just hit D for Dimension and it's actually something that I got quite fluent and uh quick at doing so I can just do GL for a line I can snap it to this origin Point here and pull it up like that and then from here I can do another line and go out to here and here okay hit escape to get rid of that uh tool so now we have several lines that are not dimensioned or constrained in any way and constrain and dimensions are the heart of good parametric design because while you could turn this into a feature um you don't know what size it is and you have no real control over Precision of it so by default freecad has given the vertical and horizontal lines vertical and horizontal constraints and that's very useful and you can easily navigate them on the right hand side here if you wanted to for example delete that you click it and delete and now that line is no longer uh horizontally constrained which is very cool I do like that but but I will say that constraints can get out of hand very quickly especially when it comes to things that are collinear I found um it can actually have too many constraints by default and things that are patented and mirrored can get very badly broken but we'll get to that in a bit so I can click here and with my reference I make that 20 can make this one 30 I can make the distance between that that line and that point uh let's say 16 something that I do like in this software and a lot of other CAD programs is you can enter a um number and divide it or do um simple mathematics within the uh the data window so 100 / 2 is 50 the sketch goes green when it's fully defined which is really cool it's saying okay hey I'm fully defined now you can't move it in stuff like solid works you might go from Blue to Black um but yeah essentially same idea and all of this is changeable in the UI uh which you can make it as familiar or as different as you like uh and so far so good right the the Black theme is working well with the sketch it's very easy to see once we start adding geometry things get a little bit different though but for now this is fully defined I'm happy with this so I'm going to close the sketch leaf sketch and now we have the sketch that we can do something too so I'm going to do a pad which might be known as an extrude in other software and this is going to give that sketch thickness so and make it 20 mm like so thick and that works totally fine so so far simple things work really well I can go back and change this no problem at all and it works fine but there is a few things that you need to be aware of that will not work in freead for example if I need a line as a reference right so for example if I'm using this to do a mirror or something that cannot be left as solid geometry because if I exit the sketch it breaks and I suggest you become familiar with seeing this report view because it will be full of red complaints before you know it so you cannot have unused geometry if you are going to do a sketch like this with geometry that's used for references whether it's Dimensions or constraints you must turn it into construction geometry it's more like old school solid works you must have a solid constrain geometry so right click it and toggle construction geometry now it's dotted like it's it's dashed like that so when you escape it's fixed again this also applies to having closed off areas of the shape for example these two boundaries like this you cannot do this in freecad you must have a continuous enclosed boundary with no free edges and no intersecting lines but here's one I prepared earlier this is the robot design that I've made in freead and it's not too bad you can see I've got some fet details I have some patent geometry details if I look at the bottom of the part here you can see I've got some nice shamers I've got some other details uh it's it's actually not too bad but here's the thing let's say we want to go back in time and change aspects of this geometry this is where freead is not very forgiving and where other software like on shape or Fusion 360 can be a lot more friendly if you know what you want and you start you go from start to finish with very minimal changes then fine it doesn't really matter too much but I have found some pretty serious bugs um so for example let's go uh to edit the first sketch of this design let's say the back of this robot design is too small and I want to extend this out by 22 to 30 so the back's just going to be little bit longer okay I've updated the sketch no problem let's exit that sketch so haven't been served any errors but clearly something wrong it hasn't actually updated so let's step through the different features to see where it didn't work so I'm going to go and set the tip here so that's our original pocket next one fine next one fine so where is it breaking well I've already investigated this it actually breaks all the way down at the polar pattern so here I've got a hole for some bolts uh around the motor and the polar pattern turns it into four holes so instead of doing four separate individual sketches that are constrained or dimensioned I've just done one hole and patented around the bo because that that's more efficient and it works totally fine but it's this polar pattern that's broken you see it's up to date there and then it's not up to date here and if I go ahead and recompute the the pattern doesn't change I have to go into the pattern and edit it and then I have to just mess around for a while so uh remove feature click pocket add feature uh add a new reference to that hole uh but that's not right let's try again um add the pocket select a new um reference uh I'm not exactly sure like I'll be honest guys I'm not sure what I was just doing there I was just trying to click it and redefine it and uh it seems to have fixed it uh but yeah that's just one thing that might not rebuild and if you're brave enough to go back in time to change geometry somewhat substantially make maybe add a new feature in that's where it just seems to be really unstable so for example I want to go back to before the fets and Champa um but just after the polar pattern and I want to add a cutout for the motor cuz I I forgot that so I'm going to go here I'm going to add create sketch and then add a cutout so what I want to do is reference the existing geometry and you can do that uh you can't do it in a solid line way but you can reference it as like construction geometry you do it through create external geometry like this and I'm going to select that line there and then I'm going to do a let's try just a rectangular cutout which will cut into the shape like that escape that and now this is where things get a bit iffy I'm going to do a uh cut a pocket so I'm going to do it up to face make sure it's all the way up to that face say okay and yeah I'm not sure why the fillet breaks um there was no fillet there in that area but yeah so in these cases it will break cascading geometry that's not even remotely related to what you just changed um I don't know the reasoning for it but it really does limit your ability go back and alter your design without having to substantially rebuild certain aspects of it now as I said I've got a lot of experience with CAD work in terms of how to set up files and make things work properly parametrically I really struggled to get this file to work and in the end broke it but I fired up on shape after not using it for years and did the same design and had it printing within an hour and if I change something in on shape it says Hey the this reference lot is lost do you want to update it or delete it if I change a plane it'll try to fix it obviously you can blow up things in on shape just as much as you can blow them up in infusion or solid works or freead and they just don't work but it's a lot more resilient and a lot more friendly to newcomers for example you can have stray geometry and it will still work you just tell it what boundary you want to use it's not as restrictive as freecad and there was various scenarios in freecad where I was genuinely stumped for example I would a pocket and it would complain an error out but that's cuz the pocket was facing the wrong way by default I had to Mir I had to uh flip the direction and make it actually cut into the object but it's not really clear that that's what's happening it just says oh pocket won't work and you have to sort of infer oh that's why it's not working not there's something wrong with my sketch it's stuff like that that I just really think could put someone off learning 3D modeling and I really don't want to see that in my previous video talking about freead programs I recommended onul es over freead itself even though it's built on it because I said the user interface was so much more polished and even after using the dev version with the dark themes I still stand by that recommendation there's just a few quirks in here that don't exist in the onzo version and it's just got that more professional polish that should help beginners get past those really steep learning curves let be real when it comes to parametric modeling and just again a quick example for example with this part in freecad with the Dark theme if I want to draw on the bottom of my model look what happens when I face the model directly to the camera the light source is making it go white and that say I do a sketch on here well where's my sketch you can't see it cuz it's the light source is making it too reflective uh I changed that myself I went to preferences light source I made it like a light green color and I change the intensity and I apply that and then look okay now I can see it but that is something I had to know to change where as you go to on onzo and you want to draw a sketch on the bottom of the the part for example like this same thing it's got this grid which I'm not a fan of but you can see the sketch right it's it's much more polished and a lot more friendly to a newcomer so I still stand by what I said I'm really really impressed with the difference between the staple release fread and the dev version I think there's a huge difference and I hope that the the dev version is is made stable very soon but I just think the onzo version is just that step above being more polished but again even with that I personally prefer on shape for free 3D modeling yes it might disappear at any time so don't expect your CAD files to last forever but it is so much uh more streamlined it is so much easier to use for a newcomer and much more forgiving if you want to go back in time and mess with your models sketches features dimensions and that sort of thing and have it update without it just blowing up and I totally get the argument that like with freead it's yours on your computer no Cloud connectivity the world could go dark and you could still use freead but I'll be honest if the time comes where that does happen I'd probably just be getting on a pirate ship so yeah anyway thanks for watching guys hope this video made sense I do understand people's passion for freead by all means keep using it keep making tutorials it's come a long way but I still stand by what I said in my previous video and I do highly recommend many other cat programs that are worth checking out for newcomers to 3D modeling especially when it comes to 3D printing if you found this video useful consider subscribing and watching some of my other videos like these ones where I go through my top CAD tips with Fusion but it is transferable to many other programs and I'll catch you again very short bye guys

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 99,779

Keywords: 3d, printing

Id: p8Pk1ayx6LQ

Length: 17min 31sec (1051 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 07 2024