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.
Freecad 1.0 actually is a lot more intuitive than it was a few months back in my opinion. I would recommend to give it a try.
Its still a but clunky at some points but for basic stuff its not bad to use
I half pay attention to freecad every few months because I do think it is genuinely a good project to exist. And while I think it is a borderline anti-pattern, having “hey, let me control this like it is that program” is a good shortcut for low budget projects.
And… I still think Angus’s (Maker’s Muse) FreeCAD video really hits the nail on the head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Pk1ayx6LQ
A lot of it, on the surface, is “open source weirdness”. And… some of that gets fixed. But it is his comparison to Onshape and Onzel (?) that really are why I actively discourage newbies from even trying FreeCAD.
Because if you know what you are doing? You can figure it out. Stuff like “oh, the default extrude is probably going in the wrong direction” or “one of the steps of my parametric build errored out. Let me step through and find it”. But that depends on knowing what you are doing in the first place. So newbies aren’t learning “CAD”. They are learning FreeCAD.
Whereas giving someone TinkerCAD or Onshape or Fusion 360? They are learning fundamental concepts. The UI/UX is such that most operations are “intuitive” once you understand a few basic concepts (mostly extrusion) and the error messages are generally good to let you realize where things went wrong.
And… while I very much do agree that a product that can’t be licensed our clouded away (even if it could still just as easily die tomorrow) is important AND disagree that piracy is a solution (in large part because of the heavy online component of stuff like fusion 360 to specifically stop piracy…)?
if Onshape dies tomorrow? I’ll be pissed. And then I’ll look for an alternative and more or less hit the ground running. And that alternative might actually BE FreeCAD. Because I know enough about modeling and design that I know what pitfalls to check for.
Whereas someone who learned FreeCAD and nothing else? They are now figuring out that padding is extrusion and unlearning countless other quirks.
And the other aspect? There is no reason for a hobbyist to actually put the effort in to learn something like FreeCAD. Tinkercad gets mocked relentlessly but… it is insanely user friendly and is more than good enough for what most people are going to be modeling on their own. And it is specifically designed as a path to fusion 360 once people realize they need to know what an assembly is. And Onshape exists too.
This isn’t a case where your options are Photoshop or MS Paint and something like GIMP is MORE than worth learning (… even if paint.net might be the better hobbyist choice as of the last time I looked). The free entry level market is, arguably, saturated for CAD programs. And early on as a hobbyist? You just want to Make. You don’t want to get hung up because of software quirks.
And if someone wants to turn this into a career or a side hustle? That is even more reason to learn a more industry standard workflow.