Hi! I started to fiddle around with freecad a little again tonight. I still find many things unintuitive. And I just watched a video about master sketches, because they are essential in my workflow on other programs. It makes it soo much easier to keep the overview and change little things quickly because I don’t have to search for the responsible sketch.

In this video the person demonstrates at around 9:15 how to use the master sketch as a reference in the sub bodies. I can get used to only get one body from a sketch, but man, how many steps does it take to just reference a sketch?! You even need to use a differen workbech, use the clone tool, but not this one and then drag and drop the duplicate into the same body you are working on? Why?! I mean the sketch is right there, just let me click it!!

This got me wondering it those rough workflows are just designed badly or if this is a limitation of the engine or whstevery it’s called, that freecad is based on? Because in my limited programming mind it does not make a difference what file is referenced. If it is some file on a directory above, just use something like “./” Before to go up one directory.

And I think those little things that just work in other cad software, makes freecad so much less approcavhabel and so much harder to jump in.

If I want to make a complicated part, that is not just a box with a hole, I don’t want to Google around until I found a solution, I want the intuitive solution to work without 3 extra steps. This just hinders my design process a lot.

Maybe someone knows how freecad works on the background and can explain why freecad works like that.

Thanks!

  • scrion@lemmy.world
    12·
    9 months ago

    I like and use FreeCAD, but I’d have to chime in and say you don’t need a multi-million dollar company to develop better UI/UX - FreeCAD has some notoriously bad workflows.

    The established user base and complexity of the software probably don’t exactly make a major UI overhaul easy, I’d reckon, so I would wager the problem is mostly historical, i. e. it grew without critical evaluation and now we’re here.

    • mranderson17@infosec.pub
      5·
      9 months ago

      Yeah that’s fair, I do think that a big UI/UX redesign that makes it magically user friendly in a single release cycle would be next to impossible with the funding the project has though, and unfortunately a long drawn out redesign (what’s currently happening with, say, RT’s UI improvements) would likely have a lot of the problems that got us to this point as well. UI/UX benefits from a closely integrated team working towards a singular goal in my (limited) experience.

      Now that I’m thinking about it a bit more, the project moves very slow and is for some reason extremely cautious about contributed core code so when things do need to be improved they become workbenches or addons and splinter the workflow even more.

      This PR for example was a massive hurdle for some transparent overlays and went quite quickly in comparison to other features https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/7888