They built blender the way they wanted. If it changed, it's because new people contributed what they wanted. If you want something designed by the marketing department, buy it. Otherwise, you are welcome to contribute code.

​@@ernststravoblofeld Doesn't it take years for them to approve any code which is why there are splinter flavours forming like linkstage3

@@gesshoku92 I don't know. It varies from project to project. But you can always fork your own.

Blender devs have always been aware of its differences with other UIs. It's not really about being "unique", but about being able to use it as effectively as possible. Blender is *still* unique and nearly all the tools and workflows it previously had still exist in it, but at the same time it's easier for newcomers from other packages to discover the desired functionality. The difficulty was to reconcile the two, but they eventually achieved it.

@@ernststravoblofeld his argument still stands. being different for the purpose of beeing different has no advantage to anyone, besides maybe your ego. After all blender is a community project, so if you want to have a big community which enables you to do bigger things, you should cater to their preferences - if you want to stay niche, obviously, you dont care. But to my knowledge, blender showed a lot of the industry what an open source perspective can have for incredible possibilities. And alone getting this knowledge out there is worth stop beeing cool and niche and try to cater to peoples preferences - some of which might be even there for a good reason other than its always been this way or the people want nicve and shiny things. I would be thrilled if freeCAD went the blender way and did the same thing for the cad world what blender did to CGI Robots and even 3d printing. Especially because i hate autodesk, dassault and all the other corporate shitholes

Only using it for 5 months, I've run across a lot of gotchas, like undoing a boolean operation that was preventing other changes to the body, then reapplying afterward... So far it's done everything I've tried, and I've learned a lot to where I can come up with workflows for the design I have in mind.

Notably, FreeCAD is at version 0.20, so completeness is not really a question, it is not complete, it does not claim to be. The question is "Is it useful in that state". I find it to be, as do others. Still other people do not.

Spot on

OSS seems to struggle with this in general. FreeCAD hasn’t yet had its Blender 2.8 or KiCad 5 moment. Neither has Inkscape. Or GIMP…

@@4axisprinting You seem to miss the point Bar Rag was trying to make; functionally FreeCAD is adequate, but its workflow and usability are so poor and backwards compared to the expectations and requirements of the *industry*. Be this product design in general or more niche industries. FreeCAD definitely needs it's Blender 2.8 moment to be taken seriously to any extent, since right now it's another OSS with the functionality there, but not the stability, transparency or usability. I've had a much better time with CATIA than with FreeCAD, and the few friends i have actually doing CAD professionally don't want to touch FreeCAD with a 50 meter pole; With good reason.

@@4axisprinting The first release of Freecad was 2002, and the first stable designated release 2022. It isnt about completeness, but about that 20y+ of freecad development spent aproximately zero minutes in UX. This isnt uncommon for open source, the dearth of UX designers in open source is a well known phenomenon. Watch some Tantracul videos sometime.

You're very welcome!

When I started using FreeCAD, I mostly used Part Design. I ended up moving to mostly working in Part both because I kept wanting to do things Part would do and because I wanted some tools from other workbenches that don't really work well with Part Design.

For me I think designing simple part in FreeCAD really is the easiest thing. With "simple" I mean a 2d sketch extruded. That's straight forward but not obvious to do in FreeCAD. Everything else might get trickier. But I made huge leaps when I understood the reason for "datum planes", "shape binders", sketches outside a part and a couple other non-obvious things...

It needs redesign as blender from 2.8

it's weird people seem to make excuses for freecad's flaws instead of anyone trying to improve it. as long as that continues, people will use fusion 360 instead.

@@TMS5100 to me it's more just that we already know what works, the formula has already been almost perfected in the form of Solid Edge, Solidworks and the other look-alikes. So having freecad not follow that same design style and usability, instead opting for weird design steps and intermediary steps of zero-thickness objects breaks all expectations we've come to have with all the other options that do a way better job of getting to a finished part that can be manufactured.

Agreed. And people just repeating "we do things differently" is missing the point that FreeCAD unnecessarily complicates even the simplest of tasks and that doing things so out of step with the workflow people are used to is just not a clever thing to do. I have a lot of patience but it ran out when I was trying to design parts in FreeCAD. IMO it’s a long way from being a viable alternative and - depressingly - headed in the wrong direction. I want FreeCAD to succeed and I would do anything (within reason) to help it succeed, except that I feel it’s headed in the wrong direction and I feel that my time, money and effort would be wasted. It’s a shame.

So you're saying it's appropriate it has a version number of .2 then and shouldn't be compared to finished and polished products. Got it.

@@brianmi40 it's not even past 1.0 and they are still trying to implement so many unnecessary things like flow simulation and robot or whatever even tho the very core of the software is completely unfinished and unintuitive? wow, that's some very bad resource management by the dev team I understand it's a "small dev team with limited resources" but that's exactly why they should spend way more time doing better management than trying to do everything and spreading their resources so thin. having a proper project manager that doesn't do any technical work is a very valuable member of a dev team, I hope they get one soon

Ondsel?

i think thats one of the other problems with the project. freecad has been around many years but the fundamental design flaws remain and it feels like it isn't making any progress. people try to use freecad, get frustrated and give up. come back a few years later to try it again, still find it unusable, give up again. meanwhile tons of other opensource projects are making huge leaps all the time.

@@TMS5100 Those "tons" of OSS that are getting the fast track love are in hotter industries, like Blender... where gaming and animation have huge interest and user bases. As for finding it "unusable" that's based upon using other software, expecting it to work the same, ignoring the hundreds of YT videos that SHOW you how to actually use it. In 5 months, there isn't anything I've found it can't do and that includes creating a part for a window regulator that is curved in two ways with tons of precision to replace a broken one in a power window, grabbing the glass and pulling it up and down in just 5 test prints, since I was just taking measurements from the old piece. If people just new to watch a set of tutorials that match the order you should learn the program (Sketch, Pad/Loft, Hole, etc.) they wouldn't have near the frustration and could almost certainly do what they wanted to do with the program. And that's exactly the mistake Thomas made in his video; trying to use knowledge of how another entirely different piece of software works, assuming this "must" work the same, and not only failing, but failing to recognize there are TONS of videos that could have taught him what he needed to know.

For example: VS Code's _"Command Pallet"_ is usually superior to a menubar, and worth getting used to. Whereas Blender's original _"Right-click to select"_ was just confusing with no real benefit.

I don't know that I would say better, since that will be a very individual preference. Personally, I like entering exact values in the data pane and some times find it easier to deal with than trying to move things in 3 dimensions with a mouse and a 2D monitor. Others probably hate that. I also find using geometry to modify other geometry to be quite natural and to better reflect formal geometry. Again, I'm sure others hate that. Least surprise is a great principle, but like most easily stated principles isn't really a single metric. As a software developer, I am sometimes surprised at what surprises some people. Most of the surprises to me are missing implementation or bugs rather than design decisions. Those will just take time to work out.

​@@4axisprinting I'd say mouse and keyboard editing are two interface paradigms which can (and should) co-exist, like in Blender. Though obviously that's more work to implement. Yes, _Least Surprise_ is obviously relative. I get the impression that perhaps FreeCAD is taking its primary inspiration from AutoCad, when more people are used to Fusion and SolidWorks now.

you can't forget copyright . it may be an issue and that's because it's different ?? each program has it's own nomenclature and learning curve . get over it or make it better . I love freecad . I salute the developers and their fine job they are doing . here is another channel I owe a great deal to with my FreeCad education . Deron at mango Jelly solutions . Great Guy Very good at it . check him out .

@@andybrice2711 All I can add on the topic is that it's hugely customisable for a .2 version (shortcut keys, etc.) and that if you take the approach of decide what you want to do, and watch the video that shows the methods to do it in the program, there's nothing I haven't found a way to get it done. That includes recreating a window regulator part with two curved surfaces to ride in the curved track of the car window along with a host of other elements to the design to have the cable power it up and down the track. 5 test prints got me there, as I was simply trying to recreate the part from incomplete data. About 8 designs in, culminating in that one, I now feel confident enough to quickly design most moderate complexity parts I'm imagining to then 3D print. All over 4 months of very part time experience. The version .2, to me, highly under sells what it is capable of, and speaks more of some bugs and future integration of tools that will lead it to be a sound 1.0

That is i do at work. Even with the worst computer I made my draws and sent then to the 3d printer, in Linux

Have you tried Onshape?

It's browser-based, which is a big "no-no" in my book.

Glad you liked it!

If it wasn't just a demonstration, I might have gone with the spreadsheet but I would still do the 360 revolve and split. Certainly I would have actually constrained the sketch :-)

@@4axisprinting Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you should have done anything other than what you did for your demonstration. I was simply saying that it could have easily been done by drawing a full profile, avoiding any offset/thickness issues. The spreadsheet comment is ignorable as it was just something I threw in because it's something I pretty much always do for any FreeCAD project. (I will note that I think a full profile sketch is better because it gives me full control over the shape, including things like varying the thickness at various locations on the pot (filament-saving measures?).

This certainly seems a much cleaner and quicker method than that shown in the demonstration.

When you go into modeling with FreeCAD with the expectations it is going to be EXACTLY like Fusion or Solidworks, you're going to have a bad time. FreeCAD is on par for simple modeling and is great for home user with say a 3D printer wanting to create custom parts.

@@todd4471 I certainly don’t expect Freecad to be a clone of Fusion 360. I don’t mind if it uses some different paradigms. That said, I wonder what is the advantage of being not only open source, but “different” than other modeling programs? In the end, if it was different but equally approachable, that would be fine with me. Modeling the example part in fusion 360 would be quick and simple for me (I am hobbiest level), in only a few steps. Using Freecad took a domain expert with intimate knowledge of the application many steps including having to anticipate limitations of the application that would be very derailing to a beginner. I simply do not believe that if I put a similar amount of effort into learning Freecad that I would be as far along as I am with Fusion. I hope it gets better, I’m rooting for it, and I appreciate all the sweat put into it by the developers, completely uncompensated. But no matter how much I like the development model, or have good wishes for the developers, it still isn’t usable for me at this point.

@@CedarMcKay Yeah the part where he changed 'Join type to intersection' was extremely challenging!

Yep.. But I've come back to it a few years later, several times; still a mess. It seems to me that something else is wrong, at the people level, not just the tech level. Someone on the team is perhaps holding it back ?

I agree, basically it is admitted that there is the industry standard way and then there is freecad way that requires thorough understanding about how the geometry is being created in the first place behind the scenes before one can know how to build relatively simple geometry. This was really hard to follow and I have something like 5 official solidworks certificates telling that I know little bit about 3d modelling. Ps. I also agree that solidworks update model and everything around it is practically pulling as much money from paying customers as possible.

It's definitely an item for the punchlist. The rest of the explanation there is notes to be attached. It should be addressed but I can well see why that isn't top priority. It's important to remember that at some point most proprietary software existed in states like this as well, it's just that nobody outside of the dev team ever got to see it (and exposing it to public view might be a termination offense). At least, in theory. In practice, I have seen proprietary software being actively sold that had bugs like that in it. All that said, bugs and all, FreeCAD is useful today and it would be a shame for it to be kept jealously under wraps unless/until every punchlist could be addressed.

You sound like a pointy haired boss. (user stories, bah) How is the software supposed to know what add-ons can solve an issue?

@@jocramkrispy305 you can call me as you wish but still someone might ask how a user is supposed to know what to do after the pretty generic error. That said I support and love free software, however as today, there is a big difference between the usability of freecad and any commercial products IMHO, even for not professional users... If I consider other free softwares (i.e. blender) I don't see such a gap, at least considering non professional use.

@@alessiozamboni4694 I'll try again. The way software could recommend an add on, is if the add on is part of the product, but disabled for charging or reliability reasons.

@@jocramkrispy305 yes, or just the developer might know that someone implemented some important features that are not (yet) in the product, even if the addon is not part of the product itself. After all, in OS software, the developers are often also users. Furthermore, as I already wrote, I would be happy also to have the checkbox disabled when the current selection cannot perform an operation; as last resort even prompt a user-readable error rather than a developer-readable one. Again, no hard feelings against Freecad. It just didn't leave me (until now) the same good impression as other free software, even if there is not much of an OS alternative, AFAIK.

You are so welcome!

Why would anyone think that a version .2 of any product could possibly be "a tool to get quick results to realize a business case"??? What we basically have here in these comments is a bunch of whining about a PRE-RELEASE VERSION not meeting the needs or smooth workflow of FINISHED PRODUCTS. To which I say, "DUH".

@@brianmi40 Dude! I don't want to attack you, but I have a different opinion on your statement. 1. What does FreeCAD's version number tell us anyway? FreeCAD uses a version numbering that follows no common standards or intuition. 2. FreeCAD has been around for 21 years. This is long enough to at least get into beta status. 😀 3. I do not criticize FreeCAD or the dev's efforts! I applaud them! However, a lot has changed in 21 years of how people learned to use such tools, and FreeCAD has failed to adopt, but on the other hand (which was also Tom's argument), there are so many unnecessary workbenches that took a lot of effort making. It needs a reorganization of the entire endeavor to make FreeCAD... 4. ... an alternative that it claims to be for Fusion 360 and other CAD tools out there. I have followed the FreeCAD project for years, and they always mock users for paying for other tools. When Autodesk changed its policies, FreeCAD was all over social media claiming that "refugees are incoming." So when you have the guts to compare yourself to multi-million corporation products, you should deliver at least a solid foundation where people don't get lost trying. Blaming them for not understanding your UI and open-source philosophy or telling them they are unwilling to put the effort into relearning workflows just because your project is not keeping up with the world, something is wrong. I am the last person on earth not wishing FreeCAD all the best, and I reconsider it to be my tool of choice multiple times per year. However, I think for open-source makers and small one-man businesses, there are better freemium options that get you faster on track than with FreeCAD. I hope they will branch out into a foundation-like structure like Blender or Godot did and collect steady funding to pay full-time devs. So... no bad blood!

@@martinmajewski Well,,, 1. FreeCAD's version number can tell us the same thing every other pre-release version number has since software was being first developed: it's NOT a FINISHED PRODUCT, and as such should expect BUGS and WORKFLOW to NOT be otpimized, as well as be FEATURE LIMITED. 2. If YOU had been a developer for FreeCAD all that time, you might be qualified to make that statement. However, given the NATURE OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE, in that it depends ENTIRELY ON DONATED PROGRAMMING EFFORT, no one is qualified to complain about how fast or slow a product has come together. Want it faster? Feel free to get out your checkbook. Despite it's .2 version, there are literally HUNDREDS of YT videos showing it ably accomplishing hundreds of designs, from simple to very complex. In anyone's software book, that's impressive for a .2 release. 3. See #2 for a reminder about how OPEN SOURCE DEPENDS ON THE EFFORTS FROM VOLUNTEER PROGRAMMERS. Claiming there are unnecessary workbenches without specifying what functionality overlaps won't get you very far. Also, as a .2 release, I'll remind you it is entirely dependent on DONATED PROGRAMMING TIME from developers, who, in such early stages of a project, are prone to have an interest in a specific area of functionality, therefore it is natural for some overlap between workbenches to occur, again, in a .2 version. 4. I've never seen FreeCAD "mock" paid tools. Happy to have a URL to see the history of that. In fact, just scanned both their home page and blog and see no such references, so be sure to share that URL. However, I see it as a natural argument / benefit of ALL open source software to be FREE and for that to appear "in opposition" to paid alternatives. As an open source initiative it's pretty hard to fault them for not having a professional marketing department and for VOLUNTEERS overstating their case, which is pretty much what every TV commercial has done since the beginning of time. Maybe FreeCAD will be better funded in the future, however, I'll still wish for it to be open source, and after 4 months applying myself to learn it, as opposed to Thomas errantly assuming it "must" work like his prior CAD knowledge has taught him despite it being obviously and hugely PRE-RELEASE, I watched many of the HUNDREDS of YT videos that very capably teach the scope of its functionality, to where today, I can create moderately complex designs from it in minutes. To ME, that is WELL punching above a .2 version number.

@@brianmi40 It's 20 years old software that cannot make even most basic tasks properly. When it will be comparable with other even most basic CAD software? In 2099 or later? From my perspective nothing changed for better in FreeCAD in more than 12 years.

​​​@@MrKuncol20 year old software maintained by a few volunteers in their free time with very little funding* It is comparable to other CAD, it can do a lot, even if it's not always as easy as in other commercial CAD software with millions in funding and a full-time development team

Same for me. FreeCAD is in many ways more logical than Fusion. Why is dimension not found under constraints in fusion? Especially the constraints list in sketches is something I sorely miss in fusion.

I'm on the same path, but so far have been able to find a good YT video for anything i try to do, most advanced of which so far was a window actuator part for a power car window, which had to be curved in two ways with lots of precise measurements to get it to work. 5 Test prints later, it works fine in the car, and I learned a TON along the way doing it. Being new to CAD is actually a benefit for you as you don't try things that don't work from prior experience. I haven't found anything I can't do in FreeCAD, just tons I haven't tried yet. I almost attempted this video myself, as I was certain it could do what Tom tried and failed with it when I watched his video.

Anyone who assumes some different software operates the way a different package they've learned behaves, and then seeing it fail, and not researching any tutorials to learn where they errored, was "wrong" per se.

Same thoughts. This is what the internet was designed for. People can invent, design, publish and communicate. This thoughtful and detailed reply earned myself and my sons ( engs) a serious try at this software. We currently use Solidworks and Fusion 360. I am willing to try a new approach and help promote it.

I keep crawling back to tinkercad which works for me as a tradesman, but using a proprietary cloud based product as such a key piece of my 3d design and printing workflow scares the hell out of me so I often come back and try to learn FreeCAD again. It seems like it's just a little ways away from being a top tier tool, but I haven't been able to successfully use the interface yet.

Certainly there are infelicities there. However, note in my video I did not constrain the sketch at all since it was just a quick illustration. The separate dimension constraints come in handy sometimes. I have actually had cases where I wanted to constrain something only horizontally or vertically while allowing free movement in the other dimension. At the end of the day, personal preference comes in to play as well, and so it's good that there are choices out there.

Because Vertical, Horizontal and (arbitrary) Distance are three separate constrains that do different things and you can't have one button to do three things unless you go NX way of suggesting constrains and dimensions on selection.

Huh? I've created entire parts without bothering with even partial constraints. Constraints are best practice as any real engineer will tell you, and without them you can get in trouble with FreeCAD, but they are far from a must have. And at 5:05, as he clearly stated, he's illustrating a WORKAROUND TO A FUNCTIONAL LIMITATION in a version .2 of a product. Let me repeat that: it's a VERSION .2 -- literally a PRE-RELEASE PRODUCT, so there will be plenty of optimization of the workspace in future releases. Lastly, a few hours watching well done applicable tutorials in YT will preclude hours of digging around in menus. Doing so, I've been able to teach myself well enough over 4 months of part time effort to design complex bodies with curved boolean cuts in two planes as well as other complex features.

Glad it was helpful!

People will contribute if they listen to what the people want, not only the hardcore users/devs.

I think you're probably just seeing the original revolve. Using it for the offset doesn't consume it, it just gets moved inside the offset in the tree. You can select it with the mouse and hit space to make it invisible.

1) solved in the realthunder fork, slowly being merged into the main codebase 2) you need to use an expression, it works in most input fields, not sure whats the issue here

@@33KK it’s still crap! I’d rather pay $500 a year to the greedy Autodesk corporation than subject myself to FreeCad.

@@Cybernetic_Systems oh so even though most of your issues are solved it's still crap. Oh also, your third point, I'm pretty sure that's what the "import defining geometry" tool does, unless I misunderstood what you mean by that.

@@33KK yes, because it's still a horrid user experience for me. Just look at KiCad vs Eagle - the opposite is true, KiCad has an amazing user experience and Eagle is horrid.

Continued availability is also one of my big reasons to choose FreeCAD. I also like that the price doesn't suddenly go way up should I actually go commercial with a design or end up arguing over what exactly constitutes commercial use. The multi-shell design is a little complex to keep track of. I have a followup video where I used a more conventional tongue and groove approach that is quite easy to implement in FreeCAD.

Like he correctly pointed out in the video, whether or not it is an alternative depends on external factors. To me it is the only alternative.

Absolutely. I only switch to part for boolean operations on bodies designed in part design.

@@MrBCRC I just ran into a really silly issue. I wanted to do a offset sketch from an original sketch. The tool isnt the sketch tools, you have to go to the Part workbench to do a 2d offset of your sketch. Now if i didnt have interent access, How was I ever going to figure it that out? Plus when you the 2d offset you still need to do extra steps to implement it into your original sketch to do a pad on it. Its actually kinda silly a simple offset tool doesnt exist in the sketch workbench.

It's worth noting though that the part workbench is the central one. Part Design is implemented by calling on tools from the part workbench.

It depends what you're designing. If you're designing a part that you want to 3d-print then you generally want part design. However, I personally also use FreeCAD to design assemblies of simple "parts" quite often, and the Part workbench has its place for this. I wish FreeCAD would standardize on a workbench and system for assemblies and constraints between multiple parts. There are several competing projects for this. That's fine, but I wish the core devs could pick one that gets bundled with the core product.

This. There is another thread comparing today's blender with freecad and it really looks like nobody used blender before 2019.

Yes. Alternatively, instead of translating the inner cut plane and the outer cut plane, you could rotate them a degree or 2.

That's very much like the advice for avoiding run-ins with the topological naming problem in FreeCAD. In Part design there's the datum plane and in Part just directly position the plane of a sketch or primitive.

Really, Part and Part Design are just different ways of working.Part Design looks a little more like other CAD programs in some ways, but is a bit less versatile and doesn't play well with tools from other workbenches. The design can be accomplished in Part Design, but personally I find it more awkward.

That's the problem, everyone just attempts to noodle around in a modern UI, thinking it should be somewhat obvious to figure out if you have any 3D experience. But if you take the alternative path: assume you know nothing and watch a tutorial video (hundreds on YT) for what you want to learn, I haven't found anything I can't do, even making sense most of the time of the workflow involved for future use. What I think any product needs, is a well graded sequence to watch the tutorial videos in to get up to speed on a product. If someone had simply told me to watch Sketch, then Pad, then Hole then Work Plane, then Raised Lettering tutorials right up front (I'm skipping many but you should get the idea), I would have save hours over figuring out that sequence on my own. The rest is ignoring it's a .2 version pre-release product.

@@brianmi40 I think every user has their motivation to use FreeCAD. Most are not commercial, and many are not to learn a skill to earn a living. The rest of us are really in two camps. One is trying to get a project done and possibly retain a skill for later. The other is leaning design/cad to have it as a skill for the future. None of that aligns with how FreeCAD currently works. The Wikis, Forums, and plethora of videos are a clown show. If you are lucky enough to find one that isn't terribly out of date, it only targets one specific task. Many lead the user directly into a topological naming problem, and practically none really discuss how to develop a workflow plan to help with success for repeated use. Your video was great for showing how to het to a solid from a revolve. But now I need a polar pattern? Look at the documentation, not a thing there that any normal human could use to learn the tools.

@@adaycj I disagree on several points, starting with it's not "my" video. First off, none of the motivations for learning FreeCAD should be commercial other than a shoestring 3D printing farm startup on a strict budget for a relatively limited number of straightforward designs. And no one trying to learn CAD skills for a future possible career should be using a .2 pre-release of an open source CAD program. There are free or low cost Student editions of virtually all of the commercial CAD systems so that is a complete strawman argument. As for "trying to get a project done" the hundreds of tutorial videos on YT testify to the ability to do that. In my personal experience learning it over 4 months, there's nothing it hasn't done for me, including creating a replacement part for a window regulator that included a 3dspace curve boolean subtraction and complex internal geometry. With thousands of active users any claim that FreeCAD can't yield functional results is ludicrous. A lack of knowledge of how to do something in it is a very different thing from the inability of the tool to do it, as Thomas was shown in this video. With over 100 KZfaq videos covering version.2 your statement about videos being outdated is also false. There are many many KZfaq tutorials where you can read the positive comments about their quality. Documentation covers how a product button or tool functions, it is not a tutorial in any way, you should stop trying to make it something it was never intended to be, that's what the literally hundreds of KZfaq videos do, including the 3 that cover polar patterns in 3 minutes or less. And the point of short single topic videos is that is what most users want thereby are what created by the experts doing them and they also eliminate searching through a 2 hour video to be reminded of a couple key steps to do something. As for polar patterns, I counted 7 videos from 2022, so plenty that are not out of date.

Its never ever EVER the softwares problem. Its always you and your lack of ability. How dare you or Thomas not think this is the greatest bit of software engineering ever to grace Mother Earth. Shame on you blasphemer!!!

Admittedly, FreeCAD does have it's rough edges, but it's worth keeping in mind that CAD in general has a fairly steep learning curve until you get into the right mindset for it.

I like Thomas, but think he owes an apology, not for what he said, but for his failure to realize that his experience in one polished, finished product, doesn't necessarily carry over to a OSS version .2 product and THEN just not realizing he needed to learn how THIS product actually works without those assumptions and just spend a bit of time watching videos (hundreds for FreeCAD on YT) which could have gotten him there... I've watched his videos a lot and expected better from him.

I'm not sure why you believe I am one of the developers. I am a software developer, so I understand what is going on in FreeCAD, but I am not the developer of FreeCAD. I AM a user of FreeCAD and I appreciate the efforts of it's developers. Perhaps if I gain enough understanding of it's code, I will contribute where I can.

Comments like this really reveal how entitled are the users of such projects. It's made by unpaid developers. Solving all your "basic" issues is much harder than it seems on the surface, CAD modeling is very complex under the hood

While I agree that an infinite plane would be nice, it isn't a deal breaker to me. The plane is still in the tree, can be made visible, and can be expanded. For what it's worth, any surface can be used to split a solid, including extruded bsplines, so there will always be cases where the splitting tool must be re-sized if the split solid is resized.

In geometry, transform is a move or rotation. Solidworks calls it that too. But you are naturally free to use what you want.

@@4axisprinting actually in solidworks they call some things like that move as well, like the move body command

Despite him only using the Transform tool to move a body, the circles on it do rotations, so yes, Transform applies and Move would be equally confusing as an oversimplification. Additionally it has an Advanced Transform capability which goes even further. Seeing something in a quick video demonstration is a bad way to assume how something works fully. Much better than digging through menus is to watch any of hundreds of excellent video tutorials on YT for any function within FreeCAD. Doing so over 4 months I'm now able to create fairly complex parts with boolean curved cuts in 2 planes along with other advanced features.

@@brianmi40 move definitely would not be equally as confusing when you’re simply moving an object, not objecting anything else, just saying move is not confusing at all to move an object

@@hahahayi1017 Yes, but back to the discussion of FreeCAD as opposed to musing about something imaginary, since there is NO MOVE TOOL in FreeCAD, then the tool that does Moves and Rotations in FreeCAD is rightly called the Transform tool, since, as already also stated, in Geometry, Moving and Rotating are called TRANSFORMING.

Yes, but this is open source and has benefits just from that, and it's of course still under constant development. It's not a problem free product, but it is free. Nobody's going to just suddenly decide to erase your account or dramatically change the licence up or start demanding cloud logins just to use a local app. For hobbyists, FreeCAD is very compelling and I decided to learn it rather than anything else for my modest 3D design needs. There's no reason to assume it can't be a 100% pro tool as well, currently not optimally so, but the future looks bright.

I get the concerns about the workbench paradigm, but without it, we might not have the very useful tools that Curves, Lattice2, and others bring at all.

you can't have two different "bodies" in a single body in vanilla FC

@@yosyp5905 Sorry, are you implying the method shown isn't vanilla FC or that the issue may have been because the result creates 2 "slices" under the body instead 2 individual bodies? Looking back again I see he did gloss over attempts to use the slice tools so perhaps he did try something similar.

@Yosyp He was using tools from the Part workbench though. No body and you can split things freely.

I'm using Linux myself. I have many concerns about the long term availability and reliability of cloud services (AKA someone else's computer).

@@4axisprinting Another concern is future access. Services come and go but I have files that I can still refer to from 25+ years ago. I've been designing circuit boards since about 1983 and the DOS software I used then still runs under Linux today. Way back I used a 2D CAD program (Visio Technical), until it sold out to Microsoft, the license changed and they told me I'd have to buy it again. Not heavily used so I abandoned several years of drawings and went entirely open format.

Awesome, thank you!

Yes. In fact, if you want the result to be a solid, you must close the shape.

@@4axisprinting but you drew the sketch, then offset it, and then selected the close option in the revolve window? What I mean is, you draw the same sketch, offset the line, connect the old and the offset line and then revolve this to directly get a solid

@@ozr2222 That is an option. There are multiple approaches to the problem. In many cases, it's as much a matter of personal taste and style as anything else.

@@4axisprinting yeah i also believe that, but the more i think about it i dont believe thomas actually is that fluent in cad, if he couldnt get this to work. His video also left me with that impression

@@ozr2222 Having work in AutoCAD professionally for nearly 2 decades I can tell you I have found FreeCAD so frustrating to get started with I haven't yet finished a project with it that would be well less than half an hour of work in AutoCAAD. As good as this video is, he has made changes to the default to get the fillet to work. At least that is mentioned here, many tutorials don't include such information. Having worked on programming projects for nearly 4 decades, I can tell you that it does feel like it could benefit from a usability and integration team. There was a guy at Palm whose job was to reduce the number of clinks to complete a task to as few as possible. Being an opensource project that isn't likely to happen unless / until it frustrates someone enough they jump in. Sadly my eyesight is bad enough now it won't be me.

Thanks for watching!

My pleasure!

Also with respect, only in some sense. Remember, FreeCAD is an open project and the core developers have no authority over what contributors choose to work on. They can only decide if it's good enough to include or not after someone else has already done the hard part. You may believe that chore X is important, but perhaps not as important as chore Y that you're working on. But if I hand you a shiny new feature giftwrapped and it will only take you a minute to incorporate it, will you reject it and tell me to go work on x, knowing that I'll just go away never to be heard from again, or will you accept it and keep working on Y until it's done so you can do x? As a side note, currently Y seems to be getting Realthunder's TNP fix into the mainline code. I have to say that really IS pretty darn important. Probably more important than the deficient fill option of the offset tool.

A lot of your comment is great, but I feel it ended poorly; The community around FreeCAD has produced a working product, and continues to produce addons and updates, so it clearly functions. That said, the lack of "completeness and quality" of features is a common in FOS software, and a not-uncommon situation in many large and long-running projects even in the paid software arena. The much-maligned 'ribbon bar' in Office 2010 was an effort to expose users to many features that had long existed in Word and Excel, but that no one used because they were buried in menus. Many of those features had been around for a decade or more. It takes (a) regularly talking to non-expert users of your software about their usability problems to find issues like this, and then (b) a will to improve the situation for new users, possibly at the expense of existing expert users. This happens rarely enough in commercial projects where new users are a major source of income; in FOSS projects, many of the developers ARE the expert users, and as long as the software meets their own needs, they lack motivation to do 'unnecessary' UI/UX work to make features more available or usable for new users. In CAD (or photo, or video, or audio, many domains, really) tools, this problem is made worse by the complexity of the tools; there are so many features, that you either hide features in menus or sub-windows, or your UI has so many buttons and widgets that it looks like an aircraft cockpit and overwhelms the user, and many projects manage to do both. Many industries are divided into 'people who use toolchain X' and 'people who use toolchain Y', not because of features, but purely because they learned one or the other, and the tools have incompatible UI paradigms. Learning the alternate paradigm puts you back at square one, and it may take tens to hundreds of hours to relearn tasks you find automatic in your old software. From a 'big corporate software' company, this is great as it locks users into using your toolchain, and provides a barrier to entry to other companies trying to compete with you.

@@4axisprinting you're absolutely correct: the users can't make demands of open source contributors. But that goes both ways: the developers can't use their own prioritisation choices as an excuse for a poor experience.

@@davidskidmore3442 yes, the fact that the core application exists is an achievement. I'm not denying that. However what I would say is that the where you have add-ons that exist *because of flaws in that core product* that have existed for years and fixed haven't been upstreamed... Yeah, that's dysfunction. Whether a) is happening I don't know, but you can see elsewhere in these comments what the community reaction to feedback is. That has two effects: first, gaslighting users reinforces the status quo making it harder to get real fixes past the "expert user" old guard; second it discourages people who might be perfectly competent developers from engaging with the project to fix those problems when they see the "skin in the game" macho gauntlet they're expected to run. None of this is inevitable, necessary, or desirable. FreeCAD specifically has a bad history of gaslighting users: for *years* the TNP was "not a bug, you're holding it wrong, it's actually better this way" issue. And to be absolutely honest I don't think it's necessarily the core developers who do this, it's more the sort of people who crop up in the first 5 minutes of asking a question in the forum to tell you you're an idiot for thinking FreeCAD would do what you want before an actual core dev turns up a day later to tell you that yes, you've found a bug. It's just toxic. And I would make the argument that complexity in the problem space does not make complexity in the UI inevitable: that's a failure of UI design. But that's fine, it's failure at a very hard task. It's entirely reasonable not to get it right first time. But that means you do need to be able to iterate and not just leave the original developer's first idea in place. And again, to be fair, I do see tweaks happening that improve things. The Sketcher has seen improvements recently, for instance - but I don't see big workflow improvements making any headway. Except on realthunder's branch. They're clearly possible, achievable, and good: it's the community that's prevented that sort of improvement on the main branch, not the complexity of the problem or technical blockers.

@@regularfryt I'm not quite sure what you mean about add-ons that only exist because of flaws in that core product that have existed for years and fixed but haven't been upstreamed? Unless you're referring to the Curves workbench? But that wasn't developed to fix that bug/limitation in the Part workbench; it just happens to do the job. I agree with you third paragraph. Their forum is a toxic place (or was the last time I visited it a couple of years ago). It does the project no favours. Yes the UI is rather clunky. But it was written by a couple of self-taught amateurs so that shouldn't come as a surprise really. But it works well enough for hobbyists like me. I use FreeCAD mainly to help in my model making 93D printing, CNC and laser). I actually maintain my own fork (of 0.19) because I was very unhappy about the code quality of the Path workbench. I've done quite a lot fixes and enhancements but I'm probably fortunate in that I have 30+ years of experience as a profession software developer. I appreciate that others who don't have the programming experience might find the idea of maintaining their own fork rather daunting.

Adding clearance would be a matter of making 2 cups, one where the inner cup thickness is reduced by 1/2 of the clearance and one where the inner cup thickness is increased by the same amount. Half of the cup where the inner shell protrudes would be matched with the opposing half of the other cup and so they would fit with the desired clearance. I didn't go in to that since it would complicate the basic point. But see kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e7p0obeBnNm1cmw.htmlwhere I use a shape binder with an offset to form a tongue and groove. Different offsets on the binders could be used to create the clearance.