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!
In a quick read, it sounds like the video you are referencing might be an old one. There’s a lot of functionality in sketcher that is relatively new that used to be done in other workbenches. And even more in the forthcoming 0.22 release.
FreeCAD can be tricky, but once you learn a workflow that keeps things smooth, it helps a lot - and that comes with experience. And while I certainly have had to watch videos and read docs on how to do some things, I’ve had to do the exact same thing with commercial tools I’ve used. And sometimes, you just have to delete a bunch of steps and re-do them. This can be frustrating, but aside from the topology naming problem, that’s really the same on the commercial products too - CAD can be frustrating. And in a lot of cases all you really need to do is go back and re-reference to work through the naming problem (such as a sketch or operation referencing a face that is now different).
In summary - it takes time and effort to learn, it’s not a simple tool. Once you start to work with it, and learn to do things the way FreeCAD wants you to, it gets a lot easier and you’ll be very productive.
For what it’s worth, my favorite FreeCAD YouTube videos are from MangoJelly’s channel. Many, many times I’ve been stuck on something and he will have a video on the exact thing. A recent one for me is failed fillets on curved surfaces and learning how tangency matters.
I hope this helps. It’s a powerful, but complex tool, with plenty of pitfalls, but once you spend the time to work with it, it’ll do what you want it to.
Oh, and one more thing - there’s a commercial product Ondsel built on FreeCAD. They are contributing a lot back to FreeCAD (and I think some core FreeCAD devs are part of Ondsel). While commercially wrapped open source can be good or bad, I think this will help move things forward for FreeCAD in a positive way. I’ve been running Ondsel myself (it’s FreeCAD at the core) as it has many 0.22 features in the current stable release.
FreeCAD is the way it is mostly because it’s not optimized by multi-billion dollar companies with teams of developers and UI/UX engineers. It’s very much the do-all-the-steps-your-self CAD package.
That said, there are loads of bad or outdated video tutorials out there, and generally people tend to find one way to do a thing and then market their video as THE way to do it. Treat FreeCAD like Linux, there are lots of “correct” ways to use it, and also don’t expect it to be something it’s not.
If you feel comfortable with it, it would be cool for you to make a short video of where you are stuck, or where you feel you are doing unnecessary steps, and maybe we can help you reach our goal in a simpler way?
I like and use FreeCAD, but I’d have to chime in and say you don’t need a multi-million dollar company to develop better UI/UX - FreeCAD has some notoriously bad workflows.
The established user base and complexity of the software probably don’t exactly make a major UI overhaul easy, I’d reckon, so I would wager the problem is mostly historical, i. e. it grew without critical evaluation and now we’re here.
Yeah that’s fair, I do think that a big UI/UX redesign that makes it magically user friendly in a single release cycle would be next to impossible with the funding the project has though, and unfortunately a long drawn out redesign (what’s currently happening with, say, RT’s UI improvements) would likely have a lot of the problems that got us to this point as well. UI/UX benefits from a closely integrated team working towards a singular goal in my (limited) experience.
Now that I’m thinking about it a bit more, the project moves very slow and is for some reason extremely cautious about contributed core code so when things do need to be improved they become workbenches or addons and splinter the workflow even more.
This PR for example was a massive hurdle for some transparent overlays and went quite quickly in comparison to other features https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/7888