Solidworks is the same way.

No, it's the topological naming problem. End of.

Isn't like every CAD program single core? People got scammed hard with Xeon in the past. CAD PC salesmen had/have absolutely no idea what they were talking about

Biggest speedup has been the GPU integration. The single core stuff doesn't seem to matter much anymore.

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.

Yeah OpenCASCADE is amazing because it's the only real geometry kernel that's open source. There's a few smaller ones like solvespace, but they're really more like toys. It's like the Linux of the CAD world.

Writing a geometry kernel is a monumental task, not unlike writing a real os kernel or a modern web engine. I've seen people just lay the basic foundations of a kernel as their PhD thesis. Most of the commercial ones were written decades ago and are still being worked on - the big ones are Parasolid ACIS, ShapeManager, CGM. The last one would maybe be considered a newcomer cause it's only 15-20 years old.

I just thought in hindsight, my response to you plugging freecad is funny.

It's like you took me into your workshop with all these benches, and I just point at the openscad bench like a caveman and grunt "scad".

I tried qcad around 2010 or so and found the UI horrible compared to autocad that I was used to. At this point in my life, drafting was pretty useless. So I had no reason to have cad unless it was free.

I found OpenScad in Y2020 and was amazed at how far it had come. It felt much more like the commercial stuff, at least to me, who was behind the times anyway.

I have a thing for experimental CAD and modeling softwares, but hadn't heard of PicoCAD! I'll have to try it out, thanks for sharing.

Some other cools ones:

• OpenSCAD
• Dust3D
• Antimony
• LibFive (same dev as Antimony)

Actually that's a great place for some "I want to help but I don't know computers" people to jump in.

I've used it for making models for 3D printing for about 5 years, never seen that issue

STL is a total abnormally and a piece of shit of a format that doesn't actually represent 3D objects very well and has a ton of issues when it comes to sharing. Unfortunately we're stuck with this shit format and Autodesk with their Tinkercad seems to want to keep pushing it because as long as we use this crappy format we're forced into sharing and collaborating inside their platform - that at some point might require a subscription.

Last time I tried freecad, the geometry solver was incorrect, so it would sometimes create two (or more) shapes from a fully constrained part. Since learning about openSCAD, I've seen no reason to give it another try.

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