Comments on: FreeCAD Foray: Good Practices

By: Sid

Sid — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 13:13:39 +0000

In reply to Urgon.

I can kind of agree with this. Though, I went through 3 different pieces of CAD software on my computer before settling down on my current choice at the end.

Sketchup to start out before I even knew what CAD meant and it was still owned by Google at the time and ran locally, Autodesk Inventor 2017 since I had a free license for it in high school but has since been expired but was still fantastic to use at the time, Fusion360 which felt limited and made me increase my hate for cloud based software and SaaS that Adobe had ignited in me beforehand, FreeCAD well before the 1.0 version and before they even had the ability to do chamfers (which made me drop it once I realized it wasn’t ready for showtime yet), and Alibre Atom3D.

Alibre Atom3D was what I am currently on and has felt so familiar to a fusion of Fusion and Inventor with more features than the first and less features than the second, respectively. Even though I’m financially fine with the upfront cost of each new license that I realized I had to get when my old computer had done it’s last power down when I was away, and the yearly fee of $50 to get updates, I’d like to see FreeCAD reach that level so I can switch my yearly subscription to a yearly donation to help them out instead for helping me out of a majority-on-top SaaS world and some other terrible business practices for hobbyists and at-home users who aren’t really using it to make money or be a business but just to make things to make life easier. I’ll give it another spin soon and hopefully see it reach a primetime level for hobbyists in the near future.

By: Mr Nobody

Mr Nobody — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 09:44:35 +0000

Another tip: Other than saving using ctl + s, do some versioning every hour or so or at least before a big and dangerous change. Once you get to Version_999, you can start deleting the older ones … or use Github.

By: Beowulf Shaeffer

Beowulf Shaeffer — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 02:46:14 +0000

Thanks. Definitely keep the tips coming!
I really prefer the mildly buggy free software to still buggy paid services, but it can be a hassle to change tools.

By: Shara

Shara — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 13:54:08 +0000

In freecad you MUST care about topology by yourself. I mean instead:
1. make cube
2. attach sketch on cube side and draw circle
3. make circle hole
4. attach sketch on cube side with hole and draw octagon
5. make octagon hole
6. remove circle hole and break octagon sketch

you need
1. make cube
2. attach sketch on cube side (maybe instead plane enough for you?) and draw circle
3. make circle hole
3.1 switch to cube in tree again
4. attach sketch on cube side without hole exists and draw octagon
5. make octagon hole
6. remove circle hole and octagon hole still exists

By: pgp

pgp — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 18:35:51 +0000

In reply to a_do_z. For the "wire ils not closes" issues, i use the sketcher_validate-sketch tool, it shows problematic intersection of a sketch. Magic!

By: pgp

pgp — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 13:08:04 +0000

In reply to MichaelK. +1, it really changes everything, ans with the help of spreadsheets you can have incredible parametric models that don't break easely. With little python scripts you can also re export all the parts in one button clic :)

By: MichaelK

MichaelK — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 10:16:28 +0000

In reply to Julian. My tip for FreeCAD is to try to avoid attaching sketches to faces in PartDesign. Attach them to the axis planes or datum planes instead and add offsets if necessary. Makes it less likely to mess up the whole model if you change things later...