And I’m curious if I could map my keys to make Freecad work this way. I don’t know how many of the these tools don’t exist in Freecad, but if I could one to one make a keybind that works for me, I might start using it instead of sketchup 8

But mostly, this is the because general CAD community on lemmy and I wanted to share, ciao!

  • wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    9 months ago

    But I find making everything parametric, really bogs things down.

    This comes down to personal preference and specific app familiarity, but for a lot of parts, yeah, following the parametric workflow is slower. That’s why there is a space for direct modeling in industry; it’s used for rapid prototyping and for getting a “dumb model” ready for FEM analysis. I maintain that it therefore also works well for Joe 3Dprinter to make a very specific object to mount his toothbrush to his sink; nobody is going to need to revise the screw spacing on their one-off object because their hardware vendor goes out of business.

    In complex parts making changes in sketchup can be a real struggle, sometimes I will just slice of a plane of the the model and redraw the offending section rather than to try to change it.

    I sometimes use an obscure German app, “BeckerCAD 3D Pro” that I got on sale for $25, which is, best I can tell, a nerfed and rebranded AutoCAD knockoff with more of a 3D focus (the “real” program is called CADdy++, from a small software and consulting firm that must have bought a lifetime license to one of the CAD engines decades ago). Even the top BeckerCAD version doesn’t include the parametric history, so between that and TinkerCAD, I have definitely done the “glue a new cube on and redo the operation” thing.

    I was hoping most actions would have some analog but it seems this is not the case.

    In the end, it’s all still 3D modeling. There are definite similarities in the concepts, and most of the differences come down to speed and scalability for certain tasks. It’s only the workflows that are so different. I think the ChatGPT thing is very telling, the way it’s also struggling to map the tools 1-to-1. I will say the latest FreeCAD releases, especially the Ondsel “light fork” that’s already based on the upcoming 0.22, make getting started a lot more intuitive.