3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
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Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
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Do not create links to reddit
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If you see an issue please flag it
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If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe/ may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is 
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Let's add CAD.
I've been screaming to everyone I know... Use freeCAD or other opensource CAD systems or free form modelers like Blender.org.
People who don't know about Auto desk and PTC don't know how evil those companies are. They're dinosaurs and need to go. Let's opensource the future.
Generally speaking, I will recommend software based on the audience's core competency.
As of FreeCAD 1.0 I can't in good conscience recommend against trying it, especially anyone that is new and just learning the principles of parametric CAD.
I get that it is still not as easy, and it's especially hard for old dogs to learn new tricks, but I feel anyone that is willing to learn how to use CAD in the first place can now learn how to use FreeCAD.
I have personally found it very fulfilling to learn FreeCAD in the last year and know I'm no longer tied to any source of enshittification in my 3D printing pipeline. (Shoutouts to MangoJelly and Deltahedran on YouTube btw.)
I also feel that as that audience grows for FreeCAD and its popularity rises, that in turn helps the users of the proprietary software. Healthy competition is important after all!
I used it a couple of weeks ago to create a replacement part for my canon 6D. I lost the top dial lol.
But in general, my interests are to create lens adapters and optics to use with my camera and my UV alternative photography printing projects.
My initial purchase for my 3D printer was to print IEMs and custom iem ear protection. Somehow I made the numbers work for my wife's approval. And indeed I was able to 3D scan a silicon mold of my inner ear canal and then used blender and UGNX to create an IEM geometry. From there it was simple to get it sliced for the mars 3 printer. I totally hate that there's not really a good opensource slicer for it on Linux. So design and slice on windows and then go back home to Linux until this last little camera part when I finally decided to do everything on Linux. FreeCAD for the design and the Linux slicer for the mars printer.
I started with FreeCAD 1.1 a few weeks ago, with virtually no CAD experience. Because I screw things up and change my mind a lot, the parametric approach has been rewarding.
God, I long for the day we get a decent open source CAD program but we just arent there yet. Script-based cad like OPENSCAD is just awful, especially for anything complex and extra-especially for assemblies, and while freecad has improved massively it's still a very similar UX to Sketchup circa 2009 :(
CAD/CAM is one of the biggest underrepresented areas for opensource software, unfortunately largely because it's so damn hard. There's a reason basically every open-source polymodeling system pulls from Blender, and that's because it's the only robust opensource option out there that's usable (though blender UI/UX is notoriously terrible for good reason, even after 2.8 and 3.2).
And unfortunately blender isn't CAD software. Fun for noodly 3D printed parts and technically you can design functional components in it... but it's deeply miserable to do.
IDK I'm just screaming into the void. grrgh.
There are many 'mods' for UI already, which is why much of the core development effort isn't addressing the UI.
Its not only that the ui/ux is bad. It's that the people working the project seem to constantly rename, or change tool names which effectively eliminated every YouTube tutorial that came before. I've tried several times to get into it, and still recognize how necessary it is that it exists and thrives, so I keep trying. But ffs, be consistent.
Agree. Using freecad coming from Pro-E/Creo /Fusion 360/on shape/Solidworks is brutal.
Yeah FreeCAD has brutal usability. I use it on occasion but if it's anything overly complex I usually switch to Fusion360
Same. I've been trying to force myself to use it but it's a chore. I've yet to get anything usable out of it.
I have made some stuff for gridfinity, there's a FreeCAD plugin, and a few other small things.
I have two pretty simple things I need to model I'm hoping to at least manage those this weekend.
I started using OpenDark theme, which I found to look more modern. Also, I believe FreeCAD has some very specific UI-work currently funded (details here), so you should definitely keep your eyes open for progress on this front going forward :)
ETA: Oh, and Blender does have some CAD-plugins - I never tried them myself, but they are supposed to make designing functional components less dreadful in Blender
Ha, thank you. The themeing is not at all my complaint with these tools, but I appreciate the tip! I look forward to seeing what freecad produces, it has a lot of potential but alas, not a lot of funding to make sure the devs can afford to eat.
Last I played around with them the blender cad plugins all use poly modeling, which puts them out of the running for anything more complex than FDM parts. Primarily they exist to either support 3D printing or for simulation/animation of simplified parts. They're... better than nothing, for sure, but unless you need something specifically given by blender you'd be much better served by just using freecad.
Well, then we need to keep donating to keep bread on their tables! :) I have no prior experience with any CAD-tools, so I guess I won't notice the shortfalls of FreeCAD UX in the same way as other people who have more extensive experience with CAD in general and other tools specifically. I also don't have very demanding needs of functionality, as most of what I draw are fairly simple structures for FDM-printing, and FreeCAD has been excellent for that. I would love for FreeCAD to get the point of being viable in a professional setting - do you know of any good write-ups that details what is still missing for FreeCAD to fill that space?
Alright, I thought perhaps they were designed to give an alternative workflow to drawing in CAD for people who are more familiar with or simply prefer Blender. I have tried to make some parts in vanilla Blender, and control of dimensions is horrid, but otherwise I do prefer to work with geometry in Blender over a CAD-workflow. But I can see that if you are doing serious CAD-work, that's not going to cut it.
Have you used Blender/FreeCAD as extensively as other proprietary paid software? You might just be used to other software being different. I think the Blender UI is pretty good and FreeCAD is just as capable as any other CAD program. I know someone who models the stuff from tootalltoby CAD Tournaments for fun in FreeCAD and he is about half as fast, but I think that's fine for being an amateur.
Unfortunately, FreeCAD has some serious functional problems in my experience. I use CAD to make models for 3d printing, and with basically any other option I can make parts significantly faster and better. Also, I have never had an issue with another parametric modeler going back to change a dimension somewhere and it breaking the entire rest of the part, but conversely in FreeCAD I have never had that actually work. It is a complete mind fuck to finish printing a part, find out you got a dimension slightly wrong, and then having to basically start the entire fucking design process over because changing that dimension in FreeCAD just throws a bunch of errors and won't show you a part anymore.
No, I am not a CAD expert, and I get that. But I can functionally use every other CAD software I have had the opportunity to use (I don't count Blender for this, there are janky addons but that isn't what Blender is). FreeCAD is near enough unusable. And anytime people bring up its shortcomings anywhere in the FreeCAD community, they get shit on for not doing CAD correctly, told that FreeCAD is exactly how it should be, and actually you are wrong for wanting it to be any different. I've spent countless hours trying to learn how FreeCAD wants me to operate, more than I'd ever spent learning Fusion360, and I still can't get it to do what I would consider to be the bare minimum.
It seems that you have only used Pre-1.0/1.1 FreeCAD from your description.
I have done some pretty complex designs with it, but the topological naming problem was really bad then.
It has improved greatly, has good defaults now, and I have yet to have any sort of crash at all and so far.
Sure, not perfect, nor even "great" and without all of the quality of life tools as F360, but it also doesn't bend you over like F360 does. Development has sped up a ton in the past couple years too. I am hoping it is on par with what F360 was before enshittification in 5 years or so.
Sadly, F360 has been spiraling downhill for a while. Everyone who uses it a lot (and especially professionally) is complaining how terribly slow and buggy it is and gets worse with every update. Apparently rampant memory leak crashes, calculation crashes, and skyrocketing prices.
I think I've seen somewhere that you should set up reference values or something so that you can change parameters on the fly without breaking anything, which is insane to need to have to do that to avoid running into the 'topological naming issue' that magically no other package had a problem with. I've basically stopped using filets and chamfers because those will just destroy any chance I can update anything on the model later on.
The community really is brutal too. I remember reading someone getting taken down because they were asking how to extrude instead of pad while they were on the 'part design' workbench
Why are those even two different things at all?!
Even in the context of having only experienced certain other CAD software a little bit (e.g. SolidEdge for one class in college, SketchUp for making maybe a handful of models, total), FreeCAD really is worse to use. It's not just the UI, (although it is partly that and it is genuinely worse, not just neutrally different), it's that stuff just starts breaking whenever you try to do anything even slightly complex (even after the "topological naming fix"), and that the workflow is just annoyingly internally inconsistent.
For example, you can make a sketch and then apply constraints to it and it's all well and good, but then you extrude it and suddenly you have to declare the height by setting the properties of the extrude instead of using a constraint or dimension. I assume there's some kind of workaround involving declaring variables in the data table thing I can't remember the name of or how to access right now, but it shouldn't have to be that way. You ought to be able to do things like create a cube by declaring an X edge to be the same length as a Y edge to be the same length as a Z edge using the same tool to set both relationships.
And this is coming from somebody who refuses to use proprietary CAD as a matter of principle at this point, and therefore really, really wants to like FreeCAD.
Lol. While I appreciate the insight, "lack of familiarity" is the "skill issue" of open source projects. I've got plenty of experience with both, and I've regularly used blender for well over a decade now (which is why I dislike it so very much).
Toby models are fun and speed modeling is a useful way to train, but performance in speed modeling does not equate to usefulness as a design tool. We used to do speed modeling challenges in scad, and while a diverting way to build skills, it has absolutely no bearing on that suite's usefulness when considering things like: complex assemblies, top-down/bottom-up design, rapid iteration, iterative design tools, surface modeling, parametric design... etc.
I know many people who speedmodel in Rhino, and while I respect the hell out of ~~the masochism~~ their skill, it will never be my first choice for designing a functional part when I have other solidbody modeling tools to choose from. Similarly, I'd never use Alibre or Fusion for cosmetics or complex surface modeling of a part. They're just not the right tool for the job.
It might suck, but if you haven't, maybe give ImplicitCAD a try: https://media.ccc.de/v/bob2020-110_implicitcad_haskell_all_of_the_things
Hey thanks, I'll check it out!
I would absolutely love for freeCAD to have complete feature and usability parity with MasterCAM, but it isn't even kind of close to usability or functionality to the major corporate offerings.
That's what you get with a volunteer run initiative. If you want for freecad to get better, contribute.
Agreed. I had to wait months for v1.1 to drop because I was having graphic display issues on CachyOS. It still glitches out when I'm trying to select sketch surfaces and even crashes too often for my comfort. The promise is there, it's just that the execution needs a little more time so I could finish migrating from Solidworks.
Unfortunately the open source options for CAD have to come a very long way before I could even consider using them. Onshape is the only "free" option I've found that is bearable to use compared to the likes of SolidWorks and Creo.
I'm very lucky that I never used the commercial programs like fusion360, freecad feels like I'm a fumbling moron simply because I am, not because I need to get used to new software.
I like "I Like To Make Stuff" on Youtube, but it annoys the Hell out of me that he plugs Autodesk Fusion 360 all the time (to the point that he even sells his own course teaching how to use it). On the bright side, at least he uses Prusa instead of Bambu, but still, the Autodesk shilling is almost enough to make me quit watching his channel.