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?
MangoJellySolutions on YouTube is really good.
Thank you!
JokoEngineering had some good videos though they are starting to be dated.
Thank you!
For someone with zero experience (meeeeee!!!), which would you recommend?
I’m not an idiot but I have no idea where to even begin. I have a 3D printer and I will need to make small, somewhat simple parts for a couple of projects I’m working on.
I can’t say one or the other definitively, I think it depends on who you like listening to the best. What I would do though is try to do one short tutorial a day for a while instead of longform videos. That tends to yield better learning results.
Simple parts for 3D printing can be done with TinkerCAD. A free and basic CAD program that can do what you want. It runs in your browser window so it’s platform agnostic also. Though I will tell you phones and tablets are very poor tools to do CAD work in. Larger screens and a mouse are virtually a necessity if you intend to not get frustrated.
After that, Fusion 360, (Windows only and a bastard install of local and cloud requirements), is popular with 3D printer enthusiasts. It’s a stripped down version of AutoDesk’s professional tool. There is also OnShape, another full CAD program that has a free license that runs in a browser window like Tinker CAD. The UI is a bit harder for newbies to navigate than Fusion. But there are limitations to hobby users.
FreeCAD is open source and a local install with support for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Newbies tend to find the CAD concepts difficult, (mostly because they are based on more proper workflows and design knowledge. FreeCAD will often punish sloppy workflows of beginners). And newbies tend to find the UI confusing. But they are working on it. The latest 1.0 release features a lot of improvements that user have complained about for years. But the learning curve is still steep and it takes some effort for those without real CAD experience and an unwillingness to practice the craft.
That said I forgot 3kkk which has a nice 100 quick tutorial. They are pre V1.0 but should still be useful!
I haven’t tried FreeCAD in years. Has it improved much?
It’s still a quirky old beast, but it’s much improved over the versions from years ago. They finally feel good enough about the assembly workbench, UI improvements, and topo-naming mitigation to release version 1.0.
I feel like it’s finally at the point where the issues are minor enough that I have the patience to deal with them. I’ve been using the release candidates for the last couple of weeks and mostly it comes down to remembering to save regularly and occasionally having to shut it down and restart. Honestly, some of the commercial solutions aren’t drastically better in that respect!
I think anyone coming from a place where they have a ton of experience in SolidWorks or Fusion might want to hold out a little longer, though it’s definitely worth a try. If you’re coming from a place where you have to learn a new program anyway, you might as well learn the free option that will only continue to improve.
It seems quite fully featured to me, and v1.0 was just released
Considerably.
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.
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
I half pay attention to freecad every few months because I do think it is genuinely a good project to exist. And while I think it is a borderline anti-pattern, having “hey, let me control this like it is that program” is a good shortcut for low budget projects.
And… I still think Angus’s (Maker’s Muse) FreeCAD video really hits the nail on the head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8Pk1ayx6LQ
A lot of it, on the surface, is “open source weirdness”. And… some of that gets fixed. But it is his comparison to Onshape and Onzel (?) that really are why I actively discourage newbies from even trying FreeCAD.
Because if you know what you are doing? You can figure it out. Stuff like “oh, the default extrude is probably going in the wrong direction” or “one of the steps of my parametric build errored out. Let me step through and find it”. But that depends on knowing what you are doing in the first place. So newbies aren’t learning “CAD”. They are learning FreeCAD.
Whereas giving someone TinkerCAD or Onshape or Fusion 360? They are learning fundamental concepts. The UI/UX is such that most operations are “intuitive” once you understand a few basic concepts (mostly extrusion) and the error messages are generally good to let you realize where things went wrong.
And… while I very much do agree that a product that can’t be licensed our clouded away (even if it could still just as easily die tomorrow) is important AND disagree that piracy is a solution (in large part because of the heavy online component of stuff like fusion 360 to specifically stop piracy…)?
if Onshape dies tomorrow? I’ll be pissed. And then I’ll look for an alternative and more or less hit the ground running. And that alternative might actually BE FreeCAD. Because I know enough about modeling and design that I know what pitfalls to check for.
Whereas someone who learned FreeCAD and nothing else? They are now figuring out that padding is extrusion and unlearning countless other quirks.
And the other aspect? There is no reason for a hobbyist to actually put the effort in to learn something like FreeCAD. Tinkercad gets mocked relentlessly but… it is insanely user friendly and is more than good enough for what most people are going to be modeling on their own. And it is specifically designed as a path to fusion 360 once people realize they need to know what an assembly is. And Onshape exists too.
This isn’t a case where your options are Photoshop or MS Paint and something like GIMP is MORE than worth learning (… even if paint.net might be the better hobbyist choice as of the last time I looked). The free entry level market is, arguably, saturated for CAD programs. And early on as a hobbyist? You just want to Make. You don’t want to get hung up because of software quirks.
And if someone wants to turn this into a career or a side hustle? That is even more reason to learn a more industry standard workflow.
I’m going to throw this copy/paste out again:
SOLIDWORKS MILITARY EDUCATION SERVICES PROGRAM SOLIDWORKS is a proud supporter of our active military and veterans, and thank them for their service. We are pleased to offer the SOLIDWORKS Student Edition at a discounted rate to military actively serving in the US or Canada and/or veterans.
It’s $20USD /$40CAD per year. I’m on my 8th year or so.
This advertisement for an awful commercial software package with a restrictive license in NO WAY helps the original poster learn FreeCAD.
This advertisement for an awful commercial software package with a restrictive license in NO WAY helps the original poster learn FreeCAD.
I am not sure why you consider it an awful commercial software package, but I have found it to be quite nice to use for learning 3D design and improving my CAD skills.
The restrictive license is right out in the open and not hidden, so there is no surprise there. I have been using SolidWorks for 8 or so years, and for designing things for around the house for my use and whatever I put on Thinginverse and Printables it has been a great deal. I don’t use it for commercial work, partly because of the license restrictions but also I am not interested in performing CAD work on the side. I do the CAD work I do at home for my enjoyment instead of watching TV.
And as far as not being able to help OP - on more than one occasion, I have had someone tell me that they were using one of the FOSS CAD programs because they didn’t know about being able to get Solidworks for that price.
Everyone has their preference, and mine is Solidworks for playing around at home, so I let OP know about it.
Even if you’re not a veteran, Solidworks for makers is $48/year, or $38/year through “Titans of CNC.” You get a grace zone of up to $2000 in profit before they expect you to get a non-hobbyist license, which unfortunately is quite pricy.
For comparison, Fusion only gives you $1000 of revenue, but the cheapest commercial license for them is much cheaper; basically, they just want you to buy the license once you pull in enough sales to cut them their check. OnShape has no similar scheme, forces free users’ designs to be open, AND has a clumsily worded EULA that raises a distinct possibility that other users can take your stuff and sell it, but you can’t. Solid Edge is a simple “non-commercial use” for the free tier. Alibre doesn’t do free at all, but offers a very cheap version that’s limited by features instead of license rights.
Meanwhile, you can use FreeCAD for whatever the hell you want, forever, with no one looking over your shoulder.
I know which avenue I’d much rather take, quirks of the software be damned.
In my experience I have two possible decision paths: Do something using a commercial solution, OnShape in my case or try to do something using FreeCAD, get nowhere, look up tutorials, get somewhere but nowhere near what I need, give up, everything collects dust in the corner.
I get the free software idea and spirit, but I’d rather actually be able to just draw and print things I need. Between work, having a house, friends, voluntary firefighting, building automation for tasks in our little village and everything else the day only has about 24 hours and I can’t just cut sleep anymore as I did in my twenties.
To each their own, but I have been able to make FreeCAD do everything I needed it to do, sometimes at the beginning with a short trip to the forums or watching a youtube video. I didn’t have to lose any sleep over it. It wasn’t any different than learning any other piece of software.
I dabbled with several (pirated) commercial CAD packages in the late '90’s and early 2000’s and I honestly don’t find FreeCAD to be any more byzantine than any of those. I think the oft-repeated canard that “FreeCAD is impossible to use” is no longer based on reality.
The point is: With OnShape, I’m able to wing it. Scan something, load the STL, define a few planes throughout the whole thing, freehand a few lines, extrude, offset here and there for clearance, print, forget. With FreeCAD I need to do it correctly and, as I just need a physical thing, I just don’t have the patience to find out what correctly would mean.
Thanks for the info. I didn’t know about the Titans of CNC option. I can pass that along to people who are not able to get the Veteran deal.
