Cabinet furniture design tools workbench

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Kunda1
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Re: Cabinet furniture design tools workbench

Post by Kunda1 »

WayofWood wrote: Wed Aug 28, 2019 8:35 pm This leaves from my point of view FreeCAD as the only viable option if you don't want to pay for a professional carpentry software package.
Agreed. I think you can use your platform to advocate for such things and rally folks in this direction. This thread is a good place to call them towards.
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iogui
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Re: Cabinet furniture design tools workbench

Post by iogui »

Hey guys!

I've been away from FreeCad because I've been busy working and I've been using Sketchup in Wine as FreeCad has not, at the present moment, a minimum of acceptable productivity at WoodWorking to be used professionally (I do work professionally as a woodworker but not with a CNC so I'm not in the two different user groups that @WayofWood have mentioned before, I'm in a third user group). As soon as I have the time, I will come back to the development of this WoodWorker's FreeCad Workbench.

By the way:
WayofWood wrote: Wed Aug 28, 2019 8:35 pm Sketchup is moving in a very commercial model with several of the existing addons (like cutlist) no longer working.
I've made some changes in cutlist source code in order to use it under Wine to be able to extract a csv cutlist. Here is the modified source code If it is of some value for someone:

https://github.com/fabio-blanco/cutlist ... ine-tweaks

I've made this tweaks for my personal use only. So don't expect it to be a full improvement.
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Kunda1
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Re: Cabinet furniture design tools workbench

Post by Kunda1 »

In other wood related news ( :D )
There's a timber WB fork in the works: https://github.com/JeromeL63/Wood-Frame
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zohozer
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Re: Cabinet furniture design tools workbench

Post by zohozer »

WayofWood wrote: Wed Aug 28, 2019 8:35 pm

Thanks. From my point of view there are at the moment only three solutions that one could use as a woodworker: Sketchup, Fusion and FreeCAD.

Sketchup is moving in a very commercial model with several of the existing addons (like cutlist) no longer working. Fusion is great and has a massive set of features but I don't believe that Autodesk will keep their altruistic model and sooner or later will go down the Sketchup road.
This leaves from my point of view FreeCAD as the only viable option if you don't want to pay for a professional carpentry software package. ;)
Add Rhino to the list. Not free, but a very reasonable price/licence. I do bought my own license for home usage. I'm using Rhino for more than two years now to design and manufacture furniture with very good results. I do used a lot of "Professional" softwares, but all of them are very difficult to use, TopSolid being the most difficult to use piece of software.

Yes, Fusion seems to be more and more expensive. You can't trust Autodesk. They are tempting peoples to get them into their ecosystem and afterwords to spoil them. It is not the first time they have this behaviour, check the history. With Fusion you don't even are in control of your files, as they are stored only into Autode$$k servers.

For me only four softwares remains: FreeCAD, who lacks a lot of functionality and not very user-friendly, every time I want to pick-up I just give-up after a few hours of fighting against the ugliest interface a CAD program can have, Rhino (I replaced Sketchup with Rhino for my needs), a very awesome and underrated piece of software, the support from McNeel is the best I ever seen from a private company, and Alibre, still need to explore this, and seems to have good tools for wood-workers (https://www.alibre.com/for-woodworking). And the last one is BricsCAD which still I do need to explore his capabilities, but at first sight looks compelling as running on Linux/Mac/Windows.

That being said, with some work, additional tools and some changes to the interface, FreeCAD can became a usable tool for furniture production. I am used to have a middle mouse button popup menu in Rhino, which I can customise and add the tools that I do most need to use. Also I am used to just begin to type a command and to have-it executed. Which in FreeCAD both of this features are missing. I don't want to dig in 100 workbenches and search for few minutes for a specific command when everything can be changed and made more accessible. I am very interested to push FreeCAD and to use-it more professionally for furniture design and production but until the interface it is not improved (and are just some small things that needs to be addressed), I literally can't.
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Kunda1
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Re: Cabinet furniture design tools workbench

Post by Kunda1 »

zohozer wrote: Sun Feb 02, 2020 12:44 pm Also I am used to just begin to type a command and to have-it executed. Which in FreeCAD both of this features are missing. I don't want to dig in 100 workbenches and search for few minutes for a specific command when everything can be changed and made more accessible
This is off topic but I'll make it brief. Check out the @triplus's add-ons in the Addon Manager
Launcher,
PieMenu,
ShortCuts,
CommandPanel
Autoload
They are still in development and not very polished but they are a step in the right direction. If you want to discuss that further please use their appropriate forum threads for each of the add-ons.
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zohozer
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Re: Cabinet furniture design tools workbench

Post by zohozer »

Hi Kunda1.

Thank you for the reply.

I checked the PieMenu project but it is not working for my needs. Basically that project just try to imitate Blender's Pie Menu, but this kind of approach it is not good for CAD imho. A MM button customisable popup a la Rhino (https://youtu.be/S4i9SOrdevM) it is more suited for CAD design.

The other projects I will check right now.
zohozer
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Re: Cabinet furniture design tools workbench

Post by zohozer »

I do installed this addons but the interface still seems to be broken even more! This tools are just not working, and the documentation on how to use them is nonexistent!

I figure-out by myself that I need to pres Shift+Q to launch the Launcher, which actually it is not launching anything. Just typed "Line", nothing happens.

The "Command Panel" it is making something, but still I didn't understand exactly what, because it is changing the icons depending on the workench selected from the top. So still no global actions for the MMButton.

So, all of this add-ons are useless. The interface it is still unusable.
zohozer
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Re: Cabinet furniture design tools workbench

Post by zohozer »

Another example: There are a lot of workbenches that are doing almost the same thing, like A2plus, Assembly3, Assembly4. We don't need ten different workbenches to do one thing. Somebody needs to be in charge of the UI of this project and structure better all this commands.
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Kunda1
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Re: Cabinet furniture design tools workbench

Post by Kunda1 »

zohozer wrote: Sun Feb 02, 2020 5:31 pm Another example: There are a lot of workbenches that are doing almost the same thing, like A2plus, Assembly3, Assembly4. We don't need ten different workbenches to do one thing. Somebody needs to be in charge of the UI of this project and structure better all this commands.
Please stay on topic. There are other threads discussing this. Please feel free to post your views related to those topics there instead of potentially derailing this thread relating to cabinet furniture topics directly
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Kunda1
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Re: Cabinet furniture design tools workbench

Post by Kunda1 »

Perhaps anyone inspired by this: https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=43781 'New Feature: Notch Connector'
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