Recently I’ve been having feelings about moving away from Fusion 360. The combination of cloud app / filesystem and their demonstrated willingness to remove features and add arbitrary limitations (eg. 10 editable model limit) makes me feel uneasy about using it. To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it. If you’ve ever rented a house you’ll know the feeling - you quite don’t feel like it’s really your home, if the landlord wants to make renovate or redecorate you don’t have any choice and you could be evicted at any moment.
So I tried FreeCAD. At first, I have to say that it felt a little like stepping out of a spaceship (Fusion) and banging rocks together like a caveman. It’s not that you can’t do (most) of the same things as an enterprise CAD package, but the killer feature of Fusion is the level of intuitiveness and “it just works” that makes FreeCAD seem like trying to write Latin.
After a week of on-and-off learning I was not sure I wanted to continue. Even after getting comfortable with the basics, frustration levels would spike to 11 sometimes. The main issue I kept running into was that altering a previous feature would break everything that came after, requiring a varying amount of work to fix. The FreeCAD wiki suggests ways to mitigate this but many of them are un-intuitive and/or inconvenient. After some googling this seems to be caused by a pretty difficult to solve issue called the “Topological Naming Problem” (where FreeCAD can’t keep track of surfaces / edges / vertexes in a stable fashion when features are changed). Then I came across this blog post that pointed out a fix has actually been developed earlier this year. A developer by the name of RealThunder has created a fork of FreeCAD called “Link Branch” which can track topology in a (more) stable fashion.
I tried this branch and was blown away by how much more usable it is. Not only can it handle changes to past features almost perfectly, but I can create multiple bodies from a single sketch (not possible before) and there are other UI tweaks that make creating features easier such as the ability to preview fillets and chamfers at the same time as selecting their edges. I’m not totally sure which of these features are unique to Link branch vs which might be pre-release in the main branch, but certainly the topology naming fix is unique to Link.
So if you have tried FreeCAD in the past and been frustrated, or if Fusion’s past free license changes or price increases are making you uneasy, give the Link Branch a try! Downloads are available in the releases page.
FreeCAD could do with a massive UX overhaul and a workflow that people could use without having to relearn how to invent the wheel. The underpinnings of the software are good. They’ve done a lot of good work there. But as far as a usable piece of software, something like Blender – with a lot more complexity, and a lot more individual toolsets (2D Animation, Video Editing, VFX, Sculpting, Poly Modeling, Bone Rigging, Scripting – ALL with entire workflows associated with them) – has managed to be a wildly usable solution despite many of its individual subsystems working together.
FreeCAD suffers from the lack of proper workflow immensely, and will hamper its adoption unless the maintainers take a far more pragmatic approach to their development. They need to take this more serious, as more usage drives more funding, which drives better development. You can’t just go “It’s open source, YOLO, fuck you if you don’t like how we do things”. Because you’re just going to flounder as a long-lived project, but never a successful one.
I complain about FreeCAD because I want it to get better. I go back to it every year at least once, just to see if they’ve opened their eyes or not. I have used everything from Siemens Solid Edge, to Inventor, to Solidworks, Fusion360, OnShape, Blender, Rhino, hell – EVEN SOLVESPACE is easier to use than FreeCAD and it’s only a solver…not even a true cad environment for anything serious (fillets, etc)
Hell, Plasticity came along just last year and it’s only $100 with no “Rental Models”, and it’s probably already got more users than FreeCAD at this point. It certainly has more people doing tutorials for it, and more people picking it up. Even though it’s not F/OSS - it’s cross platform, cheap, and non-predatory. Obviously I’d prefer F/OSS software, but I’m not going to chop off my right arm to support it or work with so much hindrance that it causes me to work at 20% effectiveness vs other CAD software. Free only goes so far when your time and attention is worth as much as it is.
Yup, I believe this boils down to good project management, someone has to steer those individual components so they work together better, in a cohesive manner, to make the result more than the sum its the parts. This is especially difficult in an opensource context where different contributors have different interests, and I think Blender, having managed that much, is an example to follow.
And I agree with everything you wrote, I don’t expect FreeCAD to get there in a reasonable timeframe unless it gets serious funding and expertise brought in.
Plasticity is a good project to follow, I don’t think they are comparable nor intended for the same audience, but there are product design aspects to learn from it, definitely :)