3DPrinting

It's improving faster. It's still a frustrating, crashy experience, but it's getting better quickly, hopefully it reached critical mass and will do Blender.

I've never had professional experience with CAD software and tried both onshape and freecad at the same time just before fc1.0 release, onshape for some reason was like using iphone or something like that while freecad was just ok. There are frustrating limitations and some things are broken and require workarounds true.

I used SW professionally for years before I retired and SW was suddenly not free to use for me anymore. Personally, I found the switch to FreeCAD was pretty easy for me. But the ease or struggle to learn something new varies a lot between people.

Best I can tell you is to forget everything you "know" from SW as best you can. And when you get frustrated that what you are doing in FreeCAD doesn't work like SW, try to remember we ain't in Kansas anymore Toto. That's how I had to approach things.

Good Luck! I'm pullin' for ya!

Same boat. After using Soldworks everything else feels soo unpolished. But I've tossed Photoshop for Gimp and it's getting easier with time, so I'll make this work too.

Yes, I would like to use freecad. And for reference I love blender and use it almost daily. The freecad interface and work flow just kind of bounce me off them so far. I can sculpt, model, paint, rig and edit video in blender. Right now getting started making a basic part in freecad seems like black magic.

It even does Finite Element Analysis and a separate mode for architecture.

Checkout Deltahedron freecad tutorials on youtube. As a complete beginner, I got reasonably good at freecad pretty fast with them.

Keep trying and keep practicing. Install FreeCAD and practice with MangoJelly tutorials to learn.

One thing that often makes it hard for people switching to any new CAD is things don't work the same way. So do your best to forget the way you used to do things. Fusion isn't FreeCAD and FreeCAD isn't Fusion. You will need to learn new things. So don't expect it to work the same way.

The next thing that is very helpful is to find models to practice and gain confidence and skills. MangoJelly tutorials are great to learn from, but you need varied practice to gain skills. Here are 50 models you can practice with to gain confidence and skills using any CAD program. Other practice models can be found if you do some searching.

Good Luck!

I absolutely get you since that was my experience also.

It's a concept thing for me. Do everything in sketches and make something with it using the Partdesign workbench. But knowing that you can't just draw a cube and extend part of one face like you can in fusion helped me to understand the take freecad has in cad.

There are some very basic beginner friendly tutorials out there on YouTube. That's what did it in the end for me.

He's very good. He is one of the developers of FreeCAD. MangoJelly tends to be my go to though.

What's the vendor lock-in like with Onshape? My father used a "free" year of Solidworks and when it was over he was locked out from all his projects unless he paid. He uses FreeCAD exclusively now and is happy to own his files.

I've been using it since it was a weekly release, (now I mostly use the 1.2 weeklies), and it's been very stable even on a low powered mini desktop with 8 Gbits of shared RAM. I think they are finally finishing up the timeline that was set out when they went after the TNP mitigation and general cleanup of the disaster that was .1X series of FreeCAD with the 1.0 release.

Spoiler Alert: I think the 1.2 Weekly releases are even better yet. So give that a shot if you are willing to put up with occasional breakage and problems. The more users of different skills with different hardware can really help speed the killing of bugs if you report issues. Besides, it's just plain fun!

I was the same way. I started with OpenSCAD and it made way more sense at first.

But what drove me to FreeCAD was when my parts started getting more and more complicated. I think it was being able to chamfer or fillet all the things that really pushed me.

I am in awe of experts of either program though. I think I still really love how openSCAD is so much easier to understand the steps someone took to get to a finished model when you look at other people's work. And you can just lift pieces out and reuse them.