I've been using FreeCad more and more, but solvespace has been a great, lightweight tool to design parts for laser cutting by SendCutSend/Oshcut.

Neat that they got it working in the browser.

▲

bhouston 4 hours ago | parent [-]

FreeCAD is amazing these days. It has completely replaced my use of Autodesk Fusion 360 for woodworking projects. It is capable and the UI is understandable. Its feature depth is incredible.

FreeCAD is becoming like Blender and Inkspace - incredibly robust and capable and equivalent in most cases to the commercial alternatives.

I find the rendering side of things under developed though.

▲

ur-whale 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> FreeCAD is amazing these days.

FreeCAD has become much better, no denying it.

"Amazing" is however not the word I would use though, the UI is still very convoluted and very hard to learn.

The worst part in FreeCAD, and which remains true to this day is the load of minutia you need to know to handle/avoid weird corner cases that you inevitable run into when you start building complex models and where FreeCAD stubbornly refuses to let you carry on with your work.

When you paint yourself into one of these corners, the software is hugely unhelpful when it comes to understanding what you did wrong and how to correct it.

In short, the word "Amazing" only works if you compare it to the absolute abomination the UI was a few years back.

But compare FreeCAD today to, for example, how slick Fusion is, there is still a very, very wide gap.

Finally, the geometry engine, is a somewhat old and creaky thing that sometimes downright fails to compute fillets or surface/surface intersections correctly, so yeah, YMMV.

FreeCAD is however, free software, and not controlled by one of the worst corp. in the world of software: Autodesk. So huge thumbs up there.

	▲	trey-jones 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is really accurate to my experience learning FreeCAD earlier this year. I am a former professional CAD user (of a lesser software than AutoCAD) and I don't think I would have gotten far without being able to ask ChatGPT for help understanding some of the quirks of FreeCAD. For free and open it's truly impressive though. Actually I think my time building iOS UIs in Storyboard was at least as useful as previous CAD experience, since constraints are the foundation of (at least one approach to) designing parts.
	▲	blacklion an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I nominate Adobe to the worst corp. in the world of software. Fusion360 at least works on Linux Photoshop/Lightroom don't.
	▲	jstanley 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The word "amazing" fits perfectly if you compare FreeCAD to viable alternatives, of which there are none.

▲

lopsotronic 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah anything involving 2d art I confess I just send to Blender, even technical illustration, with the exception of O&D style sheets.

The fact anyone got a CAD kernel working in the browser is insane. Parsing the vagaries, vendor cruft, and gaping holes in STEP files has occupied a non-trivial amount of my career.

You want to talk about poisoned specs . . .

▲

3yr-i-frew-up 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yep, love FreeCAD.

I did a major project with it in 2019 and it was great back then.

The issues it has are pretty minor. Admittedly I ended up using a fork for Assembly3(IIRC)