I thought I would knock some dust off my drafting skills after a small chat with @[email protected]
Seeing this image on the tutorial made me realize, FreeCAD seems to be a Technical Geometry Super-Suite. It makes sense that CAD would grow to include all of these things. But I thought sharing the initial perspective of some one who hasn’t looked at this stuff in about 18 years might be interesting.
Granted I’m not actually familiar with most of this stuff, and none of it from the POV of FreeCAD. If this can deliver 10% of what I’m looking at, I’m in for a treat.
Do they have editable history yet? That’s a big blocker for me jumping.
I was disappointed not to see one. That’s not a ‘no’, but I did look for one.
There’s basically a tree of operations that have been applied to a model. At any point, you can go back and edit what you’ve done at a previous step. For example, if you padded a feature out 10 mm, then added more stuff onto that feature, you could still go back and change that padding operation to 15 mm.
I’m still super new to freecad, and I haven’t done anything too complex in it yet, but my understanding is that some types of those changes can result in the topological naming problem. The way I understand it, when you make a shape, the software numbers all of the segments, vertices, and faces. If later changes are applied to those numbered faces, etc, and you go back and redo the operation that made those faces, etc, in a different order, the numbering will be different, and it will break your model.
There is a fork of freecad that fixes that whole issue, but the fix hasn’t been implemented yet in the main fork cause it’s pretty foundational to the working of freecad, so there’s a lot of things that can break
If you just attach every object to the global coordinate system instead of each other that bug can’t happen. Could be less convenient for larger projects though
I believe the company ONDSEL that is pushing development is pushing that together with its collaboration tools as the SAAS component of their freeCAD soft-fork
Further define “editable history?”
I use Fusion 360 primarily but it is available in other CAD software, this is a decent description:
It has made working on interactive designs significantly easier for me, and saves a tremendous amount of time and effort.
Ever used photoshop with an undo history? It’s particularly nice for text based commands.