Pad vs Extrude...

[f15sim]

So this has probably been done to death, but I haven't been able to find an existing thread on it...

Coming from SolidWorks or Inventor, I'm used to seeing an "extrude" tool when I want to turn a sketch into a 3D part. However, in FreeCAD this is called "pad".

As an admittedly non-professional CAD nerd, the word "pad" in the context it's used in makes absolutely no sense at all. It would be like naming the hole tool "carrot"...

Can someone enlighten me on this naming convention?

Thanks!

g.

[vocx]

...
Can someone enlighten me on this naming convention?

Try using other CAD packages. Every one of them has different terms for their tools.

FreeCAD is particularly inspired by CATIA which is used a lot in automotive and aerospace industries.

PAD COMMAND CATIA V5

[GeneFC]

Since FreeCAD is open source you can modify your personal copy to call a hole a "carrot".

Enjoy!

Gene

[drmacro]

Why is it called a milkshake in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and a frappe in Boston?

Why is it a poke down south and a paper bag up north?

Why is it a sub some places and a hoagy elswhere?

Padding is making something thicker.

[chrisb]

Milling of pockets is known much longer than computers exist. So there was enough time for the notion to settle. For what we call Padding new notions had to be found and they emerged in parallel - and stayed like that.

[f15sim]

I'm kind of at a loss here.

I get it - I was trying to be funny with the "carrot" crack. I didn't expect snark and the open source trope, "Hurr! You have the source code, change it yourself, hurr!"

So my experience level with CAD may not be "professional", but I've got a few years with Inventor and over a decade with SolidWorks. Both use "Extrude". The tiny nugget of answer I got drifting in the sea of snark was that "Pad" comes from Catia. That makes perfect sense if the early devs were Catia users. That could have been the simple, direct, and snark-free answer.
(Considering the Catia pricing makes SolidWorks look downright frugal, it's no wonder I wasn't aware of the terminology on my own...)
But no, you guys had to dump all over the newbie.

So here's the deal - My intention was to use FreeCAD to introduce CAD to folks by creating a multi-episode tutorial on YT. The idea was to use FreeCAD to create a "stand-off" scale model of a Cessna 172N cockpit section by using a properly scaled 3 view drawing to trace over. After the shell design was done, I'd go on to show folks how to create various knobs & controls for 3D printing and at the end of the series, the user would have a basic grasp of CAD and a reasonable set of plans to build a home cockpit from.

Based on the responses to a pretty simple question I've gotten here, I'm not going to start that project. I can't in good conscience point new users to a product that has a support forum that would likely get them savaged for being clueless newbies.

For reference, here's a couple of projects that I've done with CAD - the world's first cross-cockpit collimated display for DIY flight simulators: https://www.diy-cockpits.org/coll/ (Design was done using SolidWorks). The other is a "stand way the hell back-scale 109" single seat cockpit kit that you can find here: https://www.geneb.org/pitkit/index.html - you can download an ISO of the docs & DXF files from that link. The PDF build manual is 195 pages. The design was done using Inventor.

I don't expect you to take me seriously - after all, I'm just some rando off the Internet with the temerity to ask a clueless question about a terminology choice. I get that - it doesn't bother me. Just keep in mind that your responses to people matter - you folks represent a pretty substantial body of work that is FreeCAD. You may not care what people think about you, but your behavior reflects on the project. Dumping on people for asking stupid questions isn't going to further your aims of making FreeCAD a success.

[thanks to chrisb for the completely snark-free and fact-encumbered answer. ]
g.

[engdham]

Hello, f15sim,

In my humble opinion, none of them meant to offend you. I could not interpret any of their answers in a rude way (even those with jokes). Indeed, I believe that CATIA video was perfectly suitable for your questioning. If you look for FreeCAD history on the wiki, there's a quote from Jürgen on the beginning of the page where he tells about his influences by CATIA v5.

Taking me as an example, as I am not a very "power user" yet, I can tell you that I was welcome within all the topics I ever created (including some stupid questions ), always getting useful answers. Those forums were and keep being a HUGE source of knowledge, where I learned most of what I know by now. I've substituted a major commercial package at work with FreeCAD 0.16 and onward for the last 3 years, and today I can do more with FreeCAD than I could in the past with the software with 4/5 digits in price tag (except for sheet metal parts).

There are many, many, incredibly polite (and talented) users and developers in this forum, and you'll see on the User's Showcase sub-forum that newcomers receive a nice support early on and soon are posting some awesome models, macros and even entire workbenches.

So, finally, don't get upset for your first post' responses, be patient, it will be rewarding.

Best Regards.

[OficineRobotica]

Hello, f15sim

Taking me as an example, as I am not a very "power user" yet, I can tell you that I was welcome within all the topics I ever created (including some stupid questions ), always getting useful answers.

And to double down on that, you can't imagine the help that developers give to regular users here on the forum by taking on issues that are reported. I have a growing list of highly positive forum interaction with some of the main FC developers where they resolved even minor issues. This always amazed me because of the limited time they have on their hands and the willingness to stand there and listen to some inexperienced user all from the height of their programming and engineering knowledge. Try taking a spin on the "developers corner" sub forum. You can find some interesting gibberish lol.

I could not interpret any of their answers in a rude way (even those with jokes).

I found the possibility of naming some tool in FC "carrot" funny as hell....Try asking that to solidworks developers lol. At least in FC, with a little research,it is doable. What I know is that text doesn't always convey the intended state of mind. Something that ,to me, sound's aggressive might not be the writer's intention and vice versa.

[chrisb]

As an admittedly non-professional CAD nerd, the word "pad" in the context it's used in makes absolutely no sense at all. It would be like naming the hole tool "carrot"...

IF you really want an extrude tool - no problem. The equivalent to the pad from PartDesign workbench is called in Part workbench - tadaaa! - Extrude. And as it offers a taper angle you can indeed use it for carroting (the hole tool would create rather uncommon cylindrical carrots).
Uwestoehr works on something similar for the PartDesign Pad, see https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=49343, but that is not yet as far developed as the Carrot tool in Part.

[vocx]

CarrotDesign_Workbench.png (75.77 KiB) Viewed 3885 times