Recently I’ve been having feelings about moving away from Fusion 360. The combination of cloud app / filesystem and their demonstrated willingness to remove features and add arbitrary limitations (eg. 10 editable model limit) makes me feel uneasy about using it. To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it. If you’ve ever rented a house you’ll know the feeling - you quite don’t feel like it’s really your home, if the landlord wants to make renovate or redecorate you don’t have any choice and you could be evicted at any moment.
So I tried FreeCAD. At first, I have to say that it felt a little like stepping out of a spaceship (Fusion) and banging rocks together like a caveman. It’s not that you can’t do (most) of the same things as an enterprise CAD package, but the killer feature of Fusion is the level of intuitiveness and “it just works” that makes FreeCAD seem like trying to write Latin.
After a week of on-and-off learning I was not sure I wanted to continue. Even after getting comfortable with the basics, frustration levels would spike to 11 sometimes. The main issue I kept running into was that altering a previous feature would break everything that came after, requiring a varying amount of work to fix. The FreeCAD wiki suggests ways to mitigate this but many of them are un-intuitive and/or inconvenient. After some googling this seems to be caused by a pretty difficult to solve issue called the “Topological Naming Problem” (where FreeCAD can’t keep track of surfaces / edges / vertexes in a stable fashion when features are changed). Then I came across this blog post that pointed out a fix has actually been developed earlier this year. A developer by the name of RealThunder has created a fork of FreeCAD called “Link Branch” which can track topology in a (more) stable fashion.
I tried this branch and was blown away by how much more usable it is. Not only can it handle changes to past features almost perfectly, but I can create multiple bodies from a single sketch (not possible before) and there are other UI tweaks that make creating features easier such as the ability to preview fillets and chamfers at the same time as selecting their edges. I’m not totally sure which of these features are unique to Link branch vs which might be pre-release in the main branch, but certainly the topology naming fix is unique to Link.
So if you have tried FreeCAD in the past and been frustrated, or if Fusion’s past free license changes or price increases are making you uneasy, give the Link Branch a try! Downloads are available in the releases page.
To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it.
No, nope, nope, nope. Abolish this line of thinking right now. Any company that employs the predatory licensing tactics like those AutoDesk uses are not worthy of one single synapse’s worth of your continued thought. Fuck them. Shed not a single tear. They’re not giving you anything; they’re trying to lock you in as a future revenue source. Thus you have nothing to be grateful for, other than the bullet you’ve now dodged. You are Lot. Walk away and don’t look back, lest you turn into a pillar of salt.
I don’t usually get into this sort of Stallman style FOSS rant, but the behavior of the major players in the commercial modeling space – especially AutoDesk and SolidWorks/Dassault – is just exceptionally bullshit. Pandora’s box is already open on the hardware; any fool with thumbs, a credit card, and internet access can either buy or build an actual 3D printer. So instead they’ll do anything to lock the software side of this wonderful technology in their own proprietary, pay-to-subscribe box.
The Topological Naming Problem has been a thorn in the side of FreeCAD users since the dawn of time time, and while some work was put into the 0.2x release to address this (previous versions were even worse) it’s obviously still not perfect. For anyone not comfortable keeping track of forks and splits and unofficial releases, the intent for the Topo Naming fix developed in this release is for it to be incorporated back into the main line release… eventually. Also, even the most recent release of Realthunder’s fork is one major revision behind the main line release, and also has not been updated since the beginning of this year.
Despite all of this, FreeCAD along with all of its quirks and foibles represents an incredibly important bulwark against keeping a critical aspect of our hobby out of the clutches of corporations and other related doers of evil. Stick with it.
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How does FreeCAD stack against Blender?
My experience in trying Blender for 3d printed part design was short lived because it’s not really built for doing accurate and precise modeling, where FreeCAD is.
How does graph paper stack against a canvas? One is for engineering, the other is for art.
Also, FreeCAD is at least a decade behind Blender in the “No it’s actually really good now and is actually being widely adopted in industry” department.
Blender is a swiss army knife, not really comparable, but i’d recommend it over most CAD software if your main focus is 3d printing as most slicer convert to mesh data anyway.
Im not going to try and convince people who have already made their mind up, but I ditched Fusion for Blender ages ago and haven’t looked back. Its completely usable for CAD and precision design for 3D printing or what have you. Its not built for it, but its capable if you learn how.
The lack of pure CAD focus is a drawback, but it is largely made up for in blenders absolutely amazing general purpose tool set. Its not just mesh manipulation, with geometry nodes you can create complex intricate shapes that are also precise to your requirements. There are countless workflows and plugins that allow you to make blender adapt your needs. You can remix existing STLs and bring in reference photos/models/etc. Simply put IMO there is no need to use any other program for almost any aspect of 3D design, and so it has become my go to.
I don’t recommend it for beginners, but it really is an incredibly powerful tool if you put the work in. Is it better that FreeCAD or Fusion? I am not qualified to say, but I’m pretty confident there are few features either package has that blender does not.
I don’t think they are really comparable.
Personally I see blender more as an animation or organic modeling tool whereas CAD software like fusion is better when you need exact dimensions for your parts
This is nothing you have to see personally like this but it’s pretty much the definition. Blender is not CAD. End of story.
I haven’t used Blender for this purpose (or FreeCAD at all, for that matter…just OpenSCAD for doing models for 3D printing). But it looks like Blender has some sort of add-on support for parametric modeling that’s being worked on.
A constraint-based sketcher addon created by hlorus for Blender that allows you to create precise 2d shapes by defining CAD geometric constraints like tangents, distances, angles, equal and more. These Sketches are then converted into beziers or mesh which still stay editable through a fully non-destructive workflow i.e, Geometry nodes and modifiers.
It’s not, historically, the main purpose of the software, but maybe Blender will ultimately wind up moving into the CAD world too to some degree.
FreeCAD is an okay piece of software, I’ve been able to use it but it has a learning curve and in some aspects it is limited. Sounds like this branch removes some of those limitations which is neat.
I’ve also used AutoCAD which is very functional but can cost thousands of dollars a year…
I’m excited to try this, ive been looking for fusion alternatives, i cant stand the cloud based bs. Thanks for the suggestion! We all need to move away from cloud based and subscription based software.
Thanks I will have to check it out. I wish it had a flatpak or deb though. I hate appimages.
Thanks! I know I’ve tried freecad in the past and found it really tough to wrap my head around, but I’ll give it a try because as I said a few days ago, at any moment the tinkercad I use regularly could go away.
I was using link branch for awhile. It’s OK, FreeCAD is OK. It does suck at a lot though. Once solidworks released their maker plan, I jumped on it. It’s such a superior product.
seem like trying to write Latin.
This is quite funny for someone who has learned a (tiny) bit of latin, because this is 100% true, in like a positive and negative way.
FreeCAD is “unforgiving”, in that pretty much every dimension/curve/shape must be defined exactly as you want, in exchange, this makes the software very good if you know what you want to create, and how.
I’ve only used a tiny bit of Fusion at a school once, but it was a lot more “freeform” than FreeCAD, this made it easier to use, but as someone who knows what they want to create pretty exactly, I prefer FreeCAD
This reflects languages. Latin is very organized, a single verb ending changes it from like “he who did” to like “he who has done” and you’re supposed to know that. It’s heavily theorized (and is 100% paritially true) that Latin is specifically designed as an efficient language to move troops. So, harder to learn but more accuracy.
English on the other hand trades accuracy for a more natural way of relatively easy to understand speak (with a good bit of overlap where there is confusion)
Curious to know which version of freecad did you try ? Few days ago I installed the latest edge version from snap (0.22 in progress) and didn’t notice this issue. I know about this issue & realthunder, also watched some of his interviews and found that the guy is a master of his field.
Anyways, now I’m on beta channel of freecad-realthunder.
If you are used to using F360 or SolidWorks, this is the version of FreeCAD you should be using. It doesn’t have the TNP problems that the main branch has. Of course, just like commercial CAD, it’s possible to break models by deleting references, and you’ll have to fix them. Experienced users of CAD know this is always possible.
I’ve been using RealThunder’s branch of FreeCAD for a few years and I’m able to do whatever I want, pretty much just like I do in SolidWorks in my day job. Most of my time is spent in the PartDesign workbench, which is really what most people designing for 3D printing should be using.
Remember that you’re using software built and maintained by volunteers. If you want constant improvement, you’re better off paying people whose sole job it is to work on the software. It’s up to you to decide if it’s worth paying for.
I was literally just starting to learn FreeCAD and was commenting to a friend about how inflexible the design process was, I’m absolutely going to give this a go.
Thank you for posting this. My introduction to CAD was trying out FreeCAD when I reached the limits of Adobe Illustrator’s accuracy. The interface was so obtuse and difficult to work with I just gave up and assumed all CAD programs were like that. I’ll give Link Branch a shot!
