Back in college, I had a few classes on CAD (mostly for engineering design), and I became decently proficient with CATIA, SolidWorks, and Autodesk Inventor. Now that I’m getting into 3D printing, I’m coming back to CAD and finding my skills pretty rusty.
I plan to use FreeCAD as my main tool. Could anyone please recommend some tutorials that I can complete that would give me a solid working knowledge of FreeCAD and help me brush up on CAD in general?
Honestly?
Unless it is a VERY strong ideological reason, there is no reason to ever subject yourself to FreeCAD. It is an awesome tool but the UI/UX is so illogical that it makes Blender seem sane. And, to be fair, Blender IS sane once you start thinking the right way. FreeCAD you have to think like twenty different ways.
And for 3d printing? If you are windows (or mac?), the free version of Fusion 360 is all you need. If you are Linux things get a bit more annoying but I have found myself genuinely loving OnShape (also apparently the lineage goes back to the tool I learned back during high school). Yeah… everything is theoretically publicly accessible and forkable which is good from a community standpoint and bad from a privacy. But my designs aren’t anywhere near good enough for industry to steal and I can always use a code name for anything that I might not want people to know I am working on.
That said, I think there have been a few semi-sketchy forks of FreeCAD that give it a sane UI/UX? I think Maker’s Muse did a semi-recent video where he talked about a few of those.
I’m going to throw this copy/paste out again:
SOLIDWORKS MILITARY EDUCATION SERVICES PROGRAM SOLIDWORKS is a proud supporter of our active military and veterans, and thank them for their service. We are pleased to offer the SOLIDWORKS Student Edition at a discounted rate to military actively serving in the US or Canada and/or veterans.
It’s $20USD /$40CAD per year. I’m on my 8th year or so.
This advertisement for an awful commercial software package with a restrictive license in NO WAY helps the original poster learn FreeCAD.
Even if you’re not a veteran, Solidworks for makers is $48/year, or $38/year through “Titans of CNC.” You get a grace zone of up to $2000 in profit before they expect you to get a non-hobbyist license, which unfortunately is quite pricy.
For comparison, Fusion only gives you $1000 of revenue, but the cheapest commercial license for them is much cheaper; basically, they just want you to buy the license once you pull in enough sales to cut them their check. OnShape has no similar scheme, forces free users’ designs to be open, AND has a clumsily worded EULA that raises a distinct possibility that other users can take your stuff and sell it, but you can’t. Solid Edge is a simple “non-commercial use” for the free tier. Alibre doesn’t do free at all, but offers a very cheap version that’s limited by features instead of license rights.
Thanks for the info. I didn’t know about the Titans of CNC option. I can pass that along to people who are not able to get the Veteran deal.
Meanwhile, you can use FreeCAD for whatever the hell you want, forever, with no one looking over your shoulder.
I know which avenue I’d much rather take, quirks of the software be damned.
In my experience I have two possible decision paths: Do something using a commercial solution, OnShape in my case or try to do something using FreeCAD, get nowhere, look up tutorials, get somewhere but nowhere near what I need, give up, everything collects dust in the corner.
I get the free software idea and spirit, but I’d rather actually be able to just draw and print things I need. Between work, having a house, friends, voluntary firefighting, building automation for tasks in our little village and everything else the day only has about 24 hours and I can’t just cut sleep anymore as I did in my twenties.
To each their own, but I have been able to make FreeCAD do everything I needed it to do, sometimes at the beginning with a short trip to the forums or watching a youtube video. I didn’t have to lose any sleep over it. It wasn’t any different than learning any other piece of software.
I dabbled with several (pirated) commercial CAD packages in the late '90’s and early 2000’s and I honestly don’t find FreeCAD to be any more byzantine than any of those. I think the oft-repeated canard that “FreeCAD is impossible to use” is no longer based on reality.
The point is: With OnShape, I’m able to wing it. Scan something, load the STL, define a few planes throughout the whole thing, freehand a few lines, extrude, offset here and there for clearance, print, forget. With FreeCAD I need to do it correctly and, as I just need a physical thing, I just don’t have the patience to find out what correctly would mean.
JokoEngineering had some good videos though they are starting to be dated.
For someone with zero experience (meeeeee!!!), which would you recommend?
I’m not an idiot but I have no idea where to even begin. I have a 3D printer and I will need to make small, somewhat simple parts for a couple of projects I’m working on.
That said I forgot 3kkk which has a nice 100 quick tutorial. They are pre V1.0 but should still be useful!
I can’t say one or the other definitively, I think it depends on who you like listening to the best. What I would do though is try to do one short tutorial a day for a while instead of longform videos. That tends to yield better learning results.
Thank you!
I haven’t tried FreeCAD in years. Has it improved much?
It’s still a quirky old beast, but it’s much improved over the versions from years ago. They finally feel good enough about the assembly workbench, UI improvements, and topo-naming mitigation to release version 1.0.
I feel like it’s finally at the point where the issues are minor enough that I have the patience to deal with them. I’ve been using the release candidates for the last couple of weeks and mostly it comes down to remembering to save regularly and occasionally having to shut it down and restart. Honestly, some of the commercial solutions aren’t drastically better in that respect!
I think anyone coming from a place where they have a ton of experience in SolidWorks or Fusion might want to hold out a little longer, though it’s definitely worth a try. If you’re coming from a place where you have to learn a new program anyway, you might as well learn the free option that will only continue to improve.
Considerably.
It seems quite fully featured to me, and v1.0 was just released
MangoJellySolutions on YouTube is really good.
Thank you!
