this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
43 points (97.8% liked)

3DPrinting

15625 readers
182 users here now

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: [email protected] or [email protected]

There are CAD communities available at: [email protected] or [email protected]

Rules

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 ![](URL)

Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Back in college, I had a few classes on CAD (mostly for engineering design), and I became decently proficient with CATIA, SolidWorks, and Autodesk Inventor. Now that I’m getting into 3D printing, I’m coming back to CAD and finding my skills pretty rusty.

I plan to use FreeCAD as my main tool. Could anyone please recommend some tutorials that I can complete that would give me a solid working knowledge of FreeCAD and help me brush up on CAD in general?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] NuXCOM_90Percent 1 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

Honestly?

Unless it is a VERY strong ideological reason, there is no reason to ever subject yourself to FreeCAD. It is an awesome tool but the UI/UX is so illogical that it makes Blender seem sane. And, to be fair, Blender IS sane once you start thinking the right way. FreeCAD you have to think like twenty different ways.

And for 3d printing? If you are windows (or mac?), the free version of Fusion 360 is all you need. If you are Linux things get a bit more annoying but I have found myself genuinely loving OnShape (also apparently the lineage goes back to the tool I learned back during high school). Yeah... everything is theoretically publicly accessible and forkable which is good from a community standpoint and bad from a privacy. But my designs aren't anywhere near good enough for industry to steal and I can always use a code name for anything that I might not want people to know I am working on.


That said, I think there have been a few semi-sketchy forks of FreeCAD that give it a sane UI/UX? I think Maker's Muse did a semi-recent video where he talked about a few of those.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

Freecad 1.0 actually is a lot more intuitive than it was a few months back in my opinion. I would recommend to give it a try.

Its still a but clunky at some points but for basic stuff its not bad to use