1220512064 4 hours ago

IDK how they compare to professional CAD tools, but I've heard good things about FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. I know that some people use Blender for CAD work, and there are even some extensions to make it easier, but I'm dubious that the representation of meshes that Blender uses are well-suited for CAD applications.

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Fabricio20 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I tried FreeCAD and the user interface is so unintuitive and things just have constraints that block you from doing the most basic things from the get-go that I just gave up in 10m, like sibling. SCAD is scripted/programmer CAD, I like the concept and have used for a few things but it's quite a learning curve to do anything more than a cube with some funny edges! Dune3D is currently my go-to for 3d-printer related parts!

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al_borland 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I just tried FreeCAD last week. I uninstalled it after about 10 minutes. The most basic actions to just get started were throwing errors. Maybe it was user error, but it was a very bad first impression.

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fxff 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Approached it with the same attitude at the same time, after 10 minutes decided to view some basic tutorial (for an earlier release) that made things clear and I could continue basic tinkering on my own.

But of course built-in intro of Solidworks was a way better UX.

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mitthrowaway2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you mind sharing what you were trying to do? I love FreeCAD so I'd be happy to help you do it if you'd be willing to give it a second try.

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al_borland 3 hours ago | parent [-]

My main goal is to reproduce the floor plan of my house, so I can figure out how to best layout the furniture.

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mitthrowaway2 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I actually did the same thing so that I could figure out how to lay out my workshop!

What I'd do is:

- Spreadsheet workbench --> Create spreadsheet (name it "measurements"). (This is optional)

- Switch to Part design workbench --> Create body (name it "layout") --> select XY plane --> Create sketch --> Create Polyline

- Zoom out, start drawing the rooms in your house, approximately to scale.

- Before going into too much detail, add a dimension (select line --> "Constrain Distance") to the first line you draw, so that you can do the rest of your drawing approximately to scale. Then the general shape won't get messed up when you add dimensions to everything else.

- (If you have a photo or picture, you can import that to sketch over).

- Add constraints to match your room measurements, mostly vertical or horizontal distance constraints. Be careful not to overconstrain the sketch. (You can put the measurements directly into the sketch constraints, or you can put them into the top-level spreadsheet, create an alias for each cells, and then set the dimensions to reference those cells).

- Once the rooms are drawn, close the sketch and create a new sketch on the xy plane called "furniture".

- Draw some rectangles for your sofas / tables / etc, delete any horizontal and vertical constraints that get automatically added (they look like little | and _ icons), and instead apply perpendicularity constraints. Dimension your rectangles using only the "constrain distance" tool. Now you can drag them around the room and rotate them freely.

- If you want to make 3D models for these too, create new Part Design bodies for each room and each piece of furniture, create a shape binder referencing the master sketches in the Layout body, and then extrude the sketches using the "Pad" operation.

That's about as much tutorial as it makes sense to pack into a HN comment. If you give it a try, I hope it works out for you!

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al_borland an hour ago | parent [-]

Thanks! I’ll save this and give it a shot soon.

	▲	rabf 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There are excellent tutorials on youtube. Spending a couple of hours doing these will allow you to hit the ground running. FreeCad is rapidly evolving and quite a few tutorials are already using the v1.1 dev builds. Pay attention to the version used in tutorials as you can run into trouble following them if you are on an older release.

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jazzyjackson 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I like using paper and cardboard for this, dollhouse style, much easier to move things around and visualize that way and more fun than clicking a mouse to boot :^)

Inkscape is good for typing dimensions into rectangles tho

	▲	al_borland 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This was my plan B. I do have a scale I can use for it. I’ll check out Inkscape as well. I’ve tried using some raster graphics in the past, but I couldn’t type dimensions and had to use the rules and guides with snapping. It mostly worked, but was a bit annoying.