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I thought I would knock some dust off my drafting skills after a small chat with @captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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.
This is a pretty good tutorial to get started in FreeCAD. Just watch out for the topological naming issue. They still haven't fixed it, but if you know how to avoid it, you shouldn't have too much trouble.
Parametric is such a leap, when coming from toy blocks like TinkerCad in which I can really easily do all that I want except those sexy fillets...
I really want to learn it but it feels so convoluted and difficult. I'm aware that FreeCAD is not the easiest, and some commercial packages are easier to grok but their licensing is really hostile to simple hobbyists so I am trying to to take the high road, for now anyway.
If you don't want to make parametric models, you can build simpler things by combining primitive shapes in the FreeCAD part workbench. You can even fillet and chamfer them.
Mind. Blown. I had honestly not thought of that possibility. And you say fillets work? Wow, have to try that. Thanks!
The dirty secret of FreeCAD is that most drawings that look okay will extrude even if unconstrained. You just lose the ability to leverage the history tree and the model will be as brittle as any direct modeler's.
FreeCAD is on its way, it's attracting a little more money and attention, and I'm using it more and more, but I often still feel like I'm fighting it.
That is an insane bug to have in your CAD software, I don't see how it's usable for any slightly complex part.
Literally every CAD program suffers this to a greater or lesser degree. There are workarounds but they're clunky.
The issue with FreeCAD is that all the workarounds (so far) are manual. Other apps may well be doing similar things, but they're doing them behind the scenes and the user doesn't have to (for instance) specifically set up a datum plane offset at the exact same distance as the face you want to sketch on and either manage it by hand or use an integrated spreadsheet to set up and reference variables.
I like what I see coming out of FreeCAD these days, but stuff like that is... umm, a lot.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This is a pretty good tutorial to get started in FreeCAD
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.