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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world to c/opensource@lemmy.ml

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.

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[-] Tenthrow@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Do they have editable history yet? That’s a big blocker for me jumping.

[-] evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

There's basically a tree of operations that have been applied to a model. At any point, you can go back and edit what you've done at a previous step. For example, if you padded a feature out 10 mm, then added more stuff onto that feature, you could still go back and change that padding operation to 15 mm.

I'm still super new to freecad, and I haven't done anything too complex in it yet, but my understanding is that some types of those changes can result in the topological naming problem. The way I understand it, when you make a shape, the software numbers all of the segments, vertices, and faces. If later changes are applied to those numbered faces, etc, and you go back and redo the operation that made those faces, etc, in a different order, the numbering will be different, and it will break your model.

There is a fork of freecad that fixes that whole issue, but the fix hasn't been implemented yet in the main fork cause it's pretty foundational to the working of freecad, so there's a lot of things that can break

[-] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 2 points 10 months ago

If you just attach every object to the global coordinate system instead of each other that bug can't happen. Could be less convenient for larger projects though

[-] ook_the_librarian@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

I was disappointed not to see one. That's not a 'no', but I did look for one.

[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 0 points 10 months ago

Further define "editable history?"

[-] Tenthrow@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

I use Fusion 360 primarily but it is available in other CAD software, this is a decent description:

Timeline and Rollback: The timeline in Fusion 360 visually represents the design history, showcasing the sequence of features and operations. You can review, reorder, and modify design steps using the timeline. The rollback feature allows you to return to a specific point in the timeline and make edits, facilitating design iteration and exploration.

It has made working on interactive designs significantly easier for me, and saves a tremendous amount of time and effort.

this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
147 points (94.5% liked)

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