this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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3DPrinting

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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.

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[–] Crozekiel@lemmy.zip 9 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Lenggo@lemmy.world 4 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago

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?!