Hi! I started to fiddle around with freecad a little again tonight. I still find many things unintuitive. And I just watched a video about master sketches, because they are essential in my workflow on other programs. It makes it soo much easier to keep the overview and change little things quickly because I don’t have to search for the responsible sketch.
In this video the person demonstrates at around 9:15 how to use the master sketch as a reference in the sub bodies. I can get used to only get one body from a sketch, but man, how many steps does it take to just reference a sketch?! You even need to use a differen workbech, use the clone tool, but not this one and then drag and drop the duplicate into the same body you are working on? Why?! I mean the sketch is right there, just let me click it!!
This got me wondering it those rough workflows are just designed badly or if this is a limitation of the engine or whstevery it’s called, that freecad is based on? Because in my limited programming mind it does not make a difference what file is referenced. If it is some file on a directory above, just use something like “./” Before to go up one directory.
And I think those little things that just work in other cad software, makes freecad so much less approcavhabel and so much harder to jump in.
If I want to make a complicated part, that is not just a box with a hole, I don’t want to Google around until I found a solution, I want the intuitive solution to work without 3 extra steps. This just hinders my design process a lot.
Maybe someone knows how freecad works on the background and can explain why freecad works like that.
Thanks!
In a quick read, it sounds like the video you are referencing might be an old one. There’s a lot of functionality in sketcher that is relatively new that used to be done in other workbenches. And even more in the forthcoming 0.22 release.
FreeCAD can be tricky, but once you learn a workflow that keeps things smooth, it helps a lot - and that comes with experience. And while I certainly have had to watch videos and read docs on how to do some things, I’ve had to do the exact same thing with commercial tools I’ve used. And sometimes, you just have to delete a bunch of steps and re-do them. This can be frustrating, but aside from the topology naming problem, that’s really the same on the commercial products too - CAD can be frustrating. And in a lot of cases all you really need to do is go back and re-reference to work through the naming problem (such as a sketch or operation referencing a face that is now different).
In summary - it takes time and effort to learn, it’s not a simple tool. Once you start to work with it, and learn to do things the way FreeCAD wants you to, it gets a lot easier and you’ll be very productive.
For what it’s worth, my favorite FreeCAD YouTube videos are from MangoJelly’s channel. Many, many times I’ve been stuck on something and he will have a video on the exact thing. A recent one for me is failed fillets on curved surfaces and learning how tangency matters.
I hope this helps. It’s a powerful, but complex tool, with plenty of pitfalls, but once you spend the time to work with it, it’ll do what you want it to.
Oh, and one more thing - there’s a commercial product Ondsel built on FreeCAD. They are contributing a lot back to FreeCAD (and I think some core FreeCAD devs are part of Ondsel). While commercially wrapped open source can be good or bad, I think this will help move things forward for FreeCAD in a positive way. I’ve been running Ondsel myself (it’s FreeCAD at the core) as it has many 0.22 features in the current stable release.