Is FreeCAD Too Hard? | Is It Worth Learning FreeCAD? | Who, What and Why…

[@InscrutableObjects]

Definitely count me in on any and all FreeCAD videos you have coming! You have a real gift as a teacher. You're clear, and concise. It's wonderful to watch a video that gets to the point without a lot of extra filler just to pad out video length. When I see you have a 10 minute video I know it's going to actually be 10 minutes of useful information. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge.

[@ianmcleod8898]

Best one I've ever seen. I've used Blender {still trying to wrap my head around that one) I did a lot of modelling in Fusion 360 ( now it's a subscription it's out of my league) I have FreeCad on my computer have no idea how to use it but coming from Fusion I may have a toe in the door.

[@AleksanderOlo]

I’m amazed by your work and your skills! It’s a huge difference between having a knowledge and knowing how to teach others. And you definitely have this skill. Thank you for your work and pushing me out of my comfort zone

[@Keep-Making]

My pleasure! and thank you so much! 🤗

[@Ottmar555]

Based. I'll gladly watch your tutorials. Let's hope indeed that FreeCad gets it's dose of Blender makeover in the near future.

[@d.p.9567]

I’m finally making things in CAD I never thought possible. Love the software! Many thanks and blessings to the creators!

[@banjotramp1]

Freecad is not a casual learn, but it is a serious bit of software and worth a little pain and suffering. Like the man says, there will come a point where it makes sense, and there are not really a lot of good options for not a lot of money. Which if it a hobby you are not making. I have a lot of background with CAD, everything from teaching Autocad, Inventor, Pro Desktop, Librecad, OpenScad, Blockscad, Tinkercad and once upon a time HP Cad. Also Blender. This series is hands down the best I've seen.

[@highlyevil9358]

excited for the new tutorials!

[@Keep-Making]

Great! Real soon! Just tightening up all the last little bits and bobs to make sure I explain it all clearly and as correctly as I can as I'm going to sort of be learning and teaching at the same time 😅.

[@mikeklaus6618]

Here’s the fundamental problem with FreeCad. It’s so unintuitive to learn that for a hobbyist it’s just not worth the frustration. I simply can’t spend hours of frustration trying to learn something rather than doing. At that point the weekend is over, I’ve spent my time banging my head against the wall trying to draw something I think should be simple and getting completely stuck for hours, having to watch video after video and not finding an answer to my particular problem. Monday comes, back to work, wasted weekend. If you live at your computer great, you’ll love FreeCad, if you have limited time, no way, I’d rather us freaking paper and pencil.

[@janneboman8573]

Same here. FreeCad has a very steep learning curve. Extremely difficult.

[@schrodingerscat1863]

FreeCAD isn't necessarily complicated but it is badly broken and this is the thing that causes so many people to just give up with it. You can spend hours on a model then all of a sudden it blows up into a total mess for seemingly no reason. I am using the RealThunder fork of FreeCAD at the moment and a lot of problems are solved in that fork because the developer is focussed on making it usable not just adding more and more 'features' that are difficult to use.

[@chrishayes5755]

@@schrodingerscat1863 why aren't all the realthunder modifications just merged into the actual main program?

[@dschony]

I'm working since years with FreeCad, mostly on the Part workbench only (not Part Design). It's possible to do almost anything ... expect that there are some bugs with fillets and chamfers, which make the work sometimes harder, that it could be. But mainly, it's an awesome program.

[@luciankristov6436]

Its actually more complicated then it needs to be. Far too many paths to achieve what can be done with far less.

[@Elephantine999]

Really interesting, useful, and encouraging background info. Thanks!

[@MitternachtAngel]

Free CAD confuse me a lot. I'm learning Solidworks and I really like it but is too expensive, so I tried Free CAD but I find that you need to be so accurate with every little detail on how to do things or it simply doesn't work. Is very frustrating.

[@jamesotisjr2322]

my beef with FreeCAD is inconsistent, unrepeatable behavior. I do things exactly as shown in the tutorial videos and the program does not behave the same way. I get a thing to work once and it never works again.

[@tomspotterychannel]

Creating something fast and easy is not possible ,as you said..Its to CONSTRAINED :)) bloody constrains :) I love open source (very important ) but there should be some free cad program for fast conceptual design .

[@str8up598]

FreeCAD is a great project and is coming along. I just don't have the time or patience. DesignSpark Mechanical for me.

[@stevenbeebe35]

How does anyone say " No, this is not too hard " ??? That is the user's experience. It is like saying to someone, " you are wrong, I am attractive to you. " Yes, I find FreeCAD to be very confusing. I create a cylinder. I expect that I can just grab it with my mouse and move it around. Nope... that selects a surface. Why? You would think moving an object would have a higher mouse priority than modifying a surface?

[@brickmason26]

I've been at it for 2 days and just as confused as when i started because nothing works together.

[@jedemopro]

What about an easy but awesome mechanical 3D animation? For example a gear, a pistón with his connecting rod or a simple mechanism. Thanks for your interesting and useful teaching work.

[@Keep-Making]

For sure! I skill need to learn then animation side of freecad and see how that all goes together but I do like the idea.

[@jedemopro]

@@Keep-Making Perhaps an mechanical animation with Blender. Anyway, thanks for your clear and useful tutorials.

[@wisefix9256]

I like FreeCAD. It is not perfect but it is very capable. As far as the interface goes, I don't think is that bad, in fact I like it. Reminds me of the icon-centric tool-bars most applications had before mobile touch-screen devices like tablets, phones and touch-screen laptops (that could fold their keyboard 360-degrees to work like tablets) prompted Microsoft and Microsoft-like corporations to change their GUI. The reality is that FreeCAD is a desktop application, very unlikely to ever be a good candidate to be used on a tablet or other type of touch-screen device for the same reason that Fusion360 is not used either on such platforms. FreeCAD's icon-centric tool-bar system is very customizable to the smallest detail and the entire GUI can be deeply customized even further using style-sheets.

[@francootaola9172]

Would love a video tutorial in "making freecad pretty" like when I opened and saw the gui I got scared 😂😅

[@miguelangeldelcastillosanc568]

What is it like to make 3D models with a trackball mouse? Would you recommend it? Thanks for your amazing tutorials!

[@david21686]

The last time I tried using FreeCAD (about a year ago), I ran into a bunch of glitches and problems; sometimes sketches and parts would just randomly disappear, sometimes FreeCAD would freeze up. Perhaps I need a better laptop with more than 8 gigs of RAM? Anyway, I'll look forward to your tutorial. I'll also be receptive to any other free CAD program besides Blender and FreeCAD.

[@1951split]

Solid Edge Community Edition is a professional CAD program that is free for home use.

[@sstijn577]

uhm, usually those kind of issues are just bugs, thats something freeCAD is plagued with, especially intersecting edges of solids within the same body can be a big pain, but these can be worked around with some effort quite easily, just work in a different body usually does the trick

[@schrodingerscat1863]

Sounds like typical FreeCAD bugs.

[@wrhanson4145]

I would love to see a vid on how to make the text size and color change when you see the "selector' when placing lines etc. I would also like to have a snap mode similar to ACAD that I could use. I haven't used ACAD in years perhaps I am just conditioned to anticipate a similar behavior.

[@lloydbush]

I used the same tutorials to figure out FreeCAD... I would say FreeCAD is great for my pourposes (design of small practical Objects) but do you know any other free, parametric CAD programs for Linux?

[@stanislavp1903]

looking forward for the tutorial

[@user-pp2qu6ry5w]

took a couple hours to try to make a 40mm cube(not looking anything up online), in the end failed. I have to say, I normally pick up new programs fast, I abandoned trying to learn freeCAD, not worth it, Programmers of this software should start over, from scratch. This bad of workflow will never make up for its price.

[@dumbcat]

i love blender but when it comes to making real world tools sometimes i find blender frustrating

[@schrodingerscat1863]

Blender is really focussed on mesh modelling. For component modelling and assemblies it is not a good choice.

[@xl000]

FreeCad is hard to learn because it is badly designed. By comparison, SideFX Houdini is also hard to use according to some, but it is a coherent piece of software. It's a shame because FreeCad is opencascade based, meaning, there is a powerful brep architecture behind it, but it sometime fails randomly and it also too slow for real world use. Also, it has so badly optimized in some cases that it makes it unusable: create a box, create a small pocket in it, and multitransform it to make say, 2500 copies From now on, every operation that you make on the object (downgraph), will take 1 minute to recompute the whole thing, every fucking time. Including adding one point in a sketch... That make it unusable for real world projects.

[@BMXracer2024]

I wish I had a free cad artist to help me design some parts,,I have so little time until my markets

[@properjob2311]

freecad does my head in

[@AsMazasDebeselis]

It's a very interesting topic, but the author of the video doesn't seem to understand what freecad and blender are for. These are different programs designed for a specific task. I started using blender since 2011, freecad a few weeks ago and I'm already doing quite well. It all depends on experience with similar programs. The author's displeasure with open source and non-commercial apps is understandable, but if you don't like it, you can always spend a lot of money on all well-known programs. Conclusion: It was very difficult to finish watching to the end. Useless video.

[@jeffbeck6501]

This channel has that same youtube smell that you see so often.

[@hanswurst9866]

As a noob my first experience with FreeCAD is so very negative. It seems to be extremely obtuse and infinitely complicated for no reason. I cannot even figure out how to rotate stuff with a center point in the well center or how to use it without a middle mouse button... I only want to modify an STL a little but have to watch hours and hours of KZbin tutorials so that I might be able to find out what I need to do :l

[@Keep-Making]

Hang in there hans. If you are looking just to do small edits to an STL I have a micro-course right here: Start with this video kzbin.info/www/bejne/iF65omWFYs2pnNE and then take a look at this one: kzbin.info/www/bejne/b3apY4morqd0p5Y There is A LOT more to learn but for minor edits, this will get you in the right direction.

[@jeffbeck6501]

Who does not have a middle mouse button with a roller? Are in you in 1994?

[@hanswurst9866]

@@jeffbeck6501 Many modern mice are plagued by faulty middle mouse buttons that constantly break. It's also annoying having to click a mouse wheel. I am using a different mouse button by now.

[@gwyn.]

Yesn’t

[@Keep-Making]

Pretty much 😂

[@RecipeForMayhem]

After spending a lifetime learning and using Autocad, Creo (Pro/E), Solidworks, Catia, NX and a host of others, I'd have to say no. Not only is the nomenclature vastly different (a pad?) it lacks features that a parametric modeler has as basic.

[@Mythologos]

Quit FC after a month of wasted time today. It can't be learned so it can't be used. It's not software, it's somebody's hobby.

[@aronseptianto8142]

i think fundamentally the problem here is that the filming and entertainment industry in general have a better incentive to make blender succesful than the design industry's incentive to make freecade succesful

[@brocktechnology]

So your saying blender doesn't take 5000 hours to learn anymore? I may have to take another look at it.

[@REAL_MPSS]

It’s free

[@caritas3015]

Use Fusion 360! Its free now you know.

[@jeffbeck6501]

They are having to give it away now?

[@johndoe-is2fw]

Fusion360 ftw :X

[@highlyevil9358]

fusion360 for the richy rich

[@Ruthavecflute]

@@highlyevil9358 There's a free version for hobbyists. Yes it has some restrictions, but personaly I can work around those.

[@jeffbeck6501]

This channel has that youtube smell. Goodbye.

[@Smackdabinu]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Your channel and your presentation is exactly what I was looking for! The combination of Freecad and Blender is superb. I am excited to be your student!