How does it compare to FreeCAD?
Freecad is made by humans, this is made by claude
That’s all I needed to hear.
Is it? I though OpenCAD predates commercial LLMs by a few decades. Have they switched their development philosophy?
Edit: I mixed up OpenCAD and OpenSCAD.
Are you thinking of a different piece of software? This one is under a year old
How do you know?
Gross
Your question has already been answered, but I’m chiming in anyway, just to express my disappointment that this is not a viable alternative. Freecad is such a struggle for me to use; I used DesignSpark for 3d modeling and conceptualizing large builds, and I lost it when I migrated to Linux (wasn’t much of a loss, they were only making the free version worse). Freecad’s workflow is so foreign to me, and Blender doesn’t seem great for 3d modeling practical parts.
If you would’ve asked me 4 months ago I’d say the same. I come from industry standard software, so FreeCAD was barely usable if you have gotten used to some of the higher grade usability featuers. Skip a few months forward and FreeCAD development has ramped up as if it’s the cure to cancer. The features (especially usability ones) implemented in the last half a year brings it somewhat on par with what a trained engineer would expect.
For example last week they implemented automatically including reference geometry inside sketches, before you had to use a separate step to include them through a projection or intersection with the sketch plane. That is huge. I think in a few years FreeCAD will essentially be a feature complete industry standard CAD program.Thats great to hear! I’ll muster up the guts to check it out again, next time I need to model something.
Now if only I were a trained engineer…
Blender is a shining example of great foss software doing powerful stuff, but it’s just not CAD software (and not meant to be).
There are some CAD-focused plug-ins available, but even with that, you are absolutely correct.
As someone who uses Catia V5 at work I must say that I actually prefer FreeCAD over Catia.
Performance issues or primarily the way it requires to design something?
Mostly the latter. I taught myself to model by roughing out a shape with cubes and cylinders in the correct dimensions, then refining everything as needed. Freecad seems to require a fully baked 2D sketch before I can extruded anything into 3D. I’ve succeeded in that a couple of times, but its always been a struggle.
Honestly, the biggest hurdle is probably just immersing myself in the learning curve. I was regularly modeling stuff for work when I learned DesignSpark, but I don’t have much call for the skill lately.
Maybe check out Plasticity. It has a very generous 30 day trail and has a pay once - own forever perpetual license for about 120 bucks. It’s very far removed from the parametric design that is used for engineering applications but for creative modeling that is more numerically driven than something like Blender its perfect. It’s a very good middle ground between 3D modelling and CAD design. It’s very fast and intuitive compared to FreeCAD and runs natively on Linux.
Much worse. But it can do 2d drawing which Freecad does not so so it has a niche.
Freecad does 2d just fine?
What do you mean by “2D drawing”? If you mean 2D CAD, freecad can do that just fine.
Freecad is so jank but I can’t trust an ai dev either. Help
Does this function the same/similar as AutoCAD? I’ve used some paid alternatives that functioned exactly like AutoCAD, and I’ve tried librecad, which I thought would be the same, but for some reason it was more tedious to use. It’s been a while, so I can’t remember what made it harder to use, but it’d be great for a drop in replacement for AutoCAD.
Haven’t tried it. But from their website yeah, apparently they try to mimic Autocad.
Good to know, I’ll give it a try this week and see how it goes
If it matters to you, someone else pointed out that it’s heavily built by Claude.
I honestly hope no professional engineer trusts this shit with anything important. Ever.
It will definitely play a role. I’ll still try it out and see how it goes, but I’ll weigh my options. Can’t say I’m pumped about that part
How does this compare to fusion360? Us noobie hobbiests need a foss verson of that so badly.
I don’t know this, but I moved from fusion to the new version of FreeCAD, and I am really enjoying it!
