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11 months agoI also have this question. What is so different about the workflow between FreeCAD and other 3D CAD software? If you can do one, you can do the others.
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Like others have said, Autodesk is a piece of shit company that continues to be customer hostile. They pulled the rug out from underneath users years ago with F360.
FreeCAD is a good alternative. A lot of people complain about the UI polish, and complain that models break. I’ll admit that the UI isn’t as polished as commercial software like F360 or SolidWorks. However, it’s just as easy to break models in SolidWorks as it is in FreeCAD. I’ve been using 3D CAD for over 20 years, and it’s always been a problem. Even with all of my experience, I still have to fix references that get broken as I make design changes. The more you use 3D CAD, the less you run into situations like this because you’re able to think ahead and avoid them. Talk to any experienced CAD user and they’ll tell you the same thing.
The workflows of FreeCAD are just like commercial software for most functions. There are definitely features that commercial software has that FreeCAD doesn’t, but that’s where you have to make the judgement about whether it’s worth it to pay for it.
For me, I’ll continue to use FreeCAD for my personal projects. I use SolidWorks at work, but we have different demands there, and it’s worth the company paying the maintenance for it.
You don’t even have to touch any “advanced” modeling features for FreeCAD to be useful. I primarily use extrudes and revolves of sketches in the Part Design workbench. The workflow is exactly the same as what I do at work every day in SolidWorks.
FreeCAD doesn’t let you be as loosey-goosey with geometry as some commercial software. That’s because they don’t have an army of developers paid to work on “nicety” features like that.
I can break SolidWorks models the same way that I can break FreeCAD models. No CAD software is immune to this. Some fail more gracefully than others. It doesn’t mean it’s unusable. You should have seen the repairs I had to make to a SolidWorks model today because I needed to convert a generic extruded feature into a sheetmetal feature…. It took a few minutes, but it’s no different than fixing things in FreeCAD because you changed the design.