Some personal feature requests.

[yoshimitsuspeed]

Since my thread on doing official feature requests hasn't gotten any replies I thought I'd post up some of my thoughts here and at least start some discussion on them.

First is in the sketcher tools.
It would be awesome if all lines had a midpoint that could be linked to another point or midpoint. It would be nice if it was a different color or perhaps only showed up when you moused over it or something to obviously set it apart from an endpoint.
I know we can put a point linked to the line and give it a dimension halfway but then if you change the length of your line the link is no longer in the middle. If there is a midpoint and it is linked then it will always be at the mid point.

The next one is a centerpoint for the rectangle. A point that is centered in the middle of the rectangle. This way when you change dimensions the center always sits over it's linked reference point. Again this makes dimensioning much simpler.
Say you put a square over the origin. Now you have to dimension your square let's say 100mm in both directions. Now you want your square centered over the origin. Now you have to dimension the edge of the square 50mm in both directions.
Now if you want to change the dimension of your square to 99.5 x 98.7 you have to go back in and split those in half and change the dimensions to keep it centered.
If the square had a midpoint it would just stay centered over the origin or other point it was linked to.

The third is splines. In Solidworks you could make a spline which gave you the ability to make much more complex curves very easily.

There were other shape options that I miss from Solidworks but those are by far the most regularly and seriously missed.

Another feature was the ability to sketch in 3D space. this gave you the ability to do 3D modeling and surfacing much easier with much more ability.
I am sure it would take some time to get this feature as strong as it is in Solidworks but it would be great to see it come into play. Even just seeing a button in the part design toolbar with some limited functionality would be a great fist step.


Another one that I really miss is the ability to add planes and the ability to place them based off the origin, surfaces lines or really just about any other feature in the model. You could set it x units away from a surface at x angle in relation to that surface or in relation to an axis or another plane or you could make it parallel, perpendicular or just about anything else you could imagine.
Once that plane is made it sits in the tree and you can select it and sketch to it and or pocket or pad up to it.
I will give an example of where this would be really helpful. In the mean time I would love to hear any input if I did this as well as possible or if there was a better way to do this with what is now available.
I wanted to put valve reliefs in a piston top. Since I couldn't make a plane I made a pad then cut that pad at the desired angle and used that as my plane. Next I cut the valve reliefs sketching on that surface and finally pocketed the pad to make it disappear.
This seems like a pretty ghetto method and it makes it much harder to do precise placement. No matter which way I try it also always shows up on the surface of the piston.

The file was too big so I removed the fillets from the pockets. They still show up on the model for me but not in the feature tree. It did shrink the file size by about half though.

[NormandC]

Since my thread on doing official feature requests hasn't gotten any replies I thought I'd post up some of my thoughts here and at least start some discussion on them.

Please realize that these points have been discussed here many times already and this is probably why the developers have not responded.

It would be good for everyone before posting feature request topics to

- search for similar topics in the forum (they are there)
- look at the development roadmaps (some of your requests are already planned) new wiki or old wiki for us North Americans who can't access the new wiki
- look for feature requests on the Mantis bug tracker
- read the Part Design and Developers corner forum, where new development is discussed - again, some of your requests are already in development (planes).

[NormandC]

That said, a few points...

I know we can put a point linked to the line and give it a dimension halfway but then if you change the length of your line the link is no longer in the middle.

The symmetry constraint works with 2 points and a line/axis, or 3 points. With it you can set a midpoint on a line, it will always be in the middle. The third selected point is the one that is been set to the middle.

The next one is a centerpoint for the rectangle.

You can also center a rectangle on the sketch axes with two symmetry constraints.

FYI in Solid Edge a rectangle has no centerpoint and I never miss it.

I wanted to put valve reliefs in a piston top. Since I couldn't make a plane I made a pad then cut that pad at the desired angle and used that as my plane. Next I cut the valve reliefs sketching on that surface and finally pocketed the pad to make it disappear.
This seems like a pretty ghetto method and it makes it much harder to do precise placement. No matter which way I try it also always shows up on the surface of the piston.

Again, this will be solved in a future version of FreeCAD, and it's been documented.

And I already posted about this trick 2 months ago. My method does not leave any mark and can be precise. You just need to make your "dummy" pad differently.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3907&p=30704#p30704

Do you read other people's posts in the Help forum? It's a good way to learn things and methods about FreeCAD.

[yoshimitsuspeed]

Please realize that these points have been discussed here many times already and this is probably why the developers have not responded.

This may be true but I have found it hard and time consuming to try to find the information in one place.
I started that thread in hopes of having a sticky or at least a place with all the information in one place easy to find.
I thought a conversation on information and protocall on this issue would be worth it's own topic and make it much easier for those of us who don't want to spend hours searching the forums.

The symmetry constraint works with 2 points and a line/axis, or 3 points. With it you can set a midpoint on a line, it will always be in the middle. The third selected point is the one that is been set to the middle.

You can also center a rectangle on the sketch axes with two symmetry constraints.

FYI in Solid Edge a rectangle has no centerpoint and I never miss it.

Thank you. I hadn't realized the potential of the symmetry constraint. This does help a lot but it does seem a little more convoluted way to get to the same goal.

Do you read other people's posts in the Help forum? It's a good way to learn things and methods about FreeCAD.

I do whenever I have a spare moment or when I am trying to figure something out. There is so much going on and freecad has so many features that are irrelevant to me that it can be hard wading through all the information here to find what I am looking for. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.
I spend a lot of time on forums and I understand getting frusterated with redundant questions or people neglecting to search for what they are looking for. I do find this to be one of the harder forums to navigate and search and I think that often leads me to quickly loose motivation to do so. Maybe that's just me, I don't know.

There is still the aspect of not knowing what is going on or knowing how to follow registered requests or when or how to make official requests or if that's even my place.
I have looked through mantis, the old wiki and the new wiki. I occasionally browse through the forums. I haven't seen anything on official requests for the things I have posted above let alone somewhere that might say what priority they are or some rough idea of when they will be implemented.
I know in many ways I expect too much of beta freeware so early in it's development but I think it would help a lot if it was easy to see what was going on and see that the things that are important to me are important to others.

[surfin_eddie]

therefore we've started to discuss how to structure the documentation to make all the helps acessible in a good and consistent way, ideally structured also according to tasks etc. You're invited to collaborate!

post "wiki pages"
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3988&start=20

wiki page "wiki pages"
http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.ph ... =WikiPages

wiki page "wiki page doc schemes"
http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.ph ... DocSchemes

best regards,

Ralf
... scnr