where do you see FreeCAD main focus go towards?

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Cekuhnen
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where do you see FreeCAD main focus go towards?

Post by Cekuhnen »

Hi all

I am curious about where you see the FreeCADs focus to be ?

It is a quite interesting design platform with architecture, mechanical design, and some quite fun experimental work benches like SILK.


Coming from industrial and interior design obviously for me the main interest is:

does it provide all the tools I would need to model surfaces for industrial design

does it provide enough tools for drafting, architecture modeling, and construction drawing documentation to maybe be used for interior design projects or as a go to tool for graduated students who do not have access to EDU AutoCAD Revit and Sketchup licenses.


For industrial design I noticed that FreeCAD has a much stronger focus on mechanical modeling.

Loft lacks the ability to blend between targets.

Fillet has no G2

Sketcher is limited to B-splines and also how to snap to it
Sketcher has no fitpoint curve
Sketcher is limited with projecting curves and splines

Surfacing needs are broken up between Part, Surface and Curve WB.
Curve WB I assume because it is written in Python has computation speed problem making single transitions slow.

while this are just few tools only they can be very crucial.


Now I know FreeCAD is all developed by volunteers - I cannot code sadly.

My question is not to be read as ranting just as being curious about the realistic scope of what could be achieved?


And whats your view in regards to interior design architecture ? It seems to me that here it is actually pretty competent.
Thats the next module for me to test in the following weeks.
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chrisb
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Re: where do you see FreeCAD main focus go towards?

Post by chrisb »

You should have seen enough to be able to decide yourself. Nobody will guarantee that this or that important feature will be available without any drawbacks at a certain date. We all are waiting eagerly for THE important change which will tackle the topological naming. And I hope this has precedence over all other big changes.
Of course there can and will meanwhile be changes in other areas as well.
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Re: where do you see FreeCAD main focus go towards?

Post by Kunda1 »

My take echoes something another user (maybe 'vanuan'?) has said is that FC is more a bazzar than a cathedral. FC being such a versatile framework (take a deep dive through the external workbenches in the FreeCAD-Addons GitHub repo) that really we're not sure what the limitation are.

As Chris said, toponaming is the real focus. Hopefully fixing upstream OpenCascade bugs or making high quality workarounds in the FC code.
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Cekuhnen
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Re: where do you see FreeCAD main focus go towards?

Post by Cekuhnen »

chrisb wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 9:31 pm You should have seen enough to be able to decide yourself.
You did not understand the question.
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Cekuhnen
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Re: where do you see FreeCAD main focus go towards?

Post by Cekuhnen »

Kunda1 wrote: Tue Jul 27, 2021 9:50 pm My take echoes something another user (maybe 'vanuan'?) has said is that FC is more a bazzar than a cathedral.
That’s a pretty good analogy. It seems development is working on many areas considering the different workbenches but not having a centralized organization.
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Re: where do you see FreeCAD main focus go towards?

Post by Kunda1 »

Yea, so there is something very interesting happening in this project. Some people have a real hard time with the lack of structure. But this project is a 20 year old beast that is blossoming. We're on the verge of a breakthrough with toponaming. This will be huge when we get it merged in to master.


Edit:

After that, maybe we can address the bifurcation (trifurcation even :D ) of the Assembly solutions. Figure out how to fuse A2+, A3, and A4 in to one functioning Assembly workbench. Note, each workbench was born out of a necessity to address the current broken assembly branch.

Simultaneously, maybe we can upgrade some needed UI/UX issues? (this is a very controversial topic, but we'll battle it out and figure it out in the end)
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Re: where do you see FreeCAD main focus go towards?

Post by Cekuhnen »

Yeah the diversity of freecad can also be curse when it comes to streamlining.
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Re: where do you see FreeCAD main focus go towards?

Post by Kunda1 »

That's why FreeCAD's motto has been: "It's done when it's done" for a reason.
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Re: where do you see FreeCAD main focus go towards?

Post by drmacro »

Some of the answer to this question is communication.

It appears that the core devs are in an ivory tower. Now, it may be that they are cloistered in an effort to merge tnp. And, it's true that sending daily briefings would take time away from the effort, but, the lack of any updates from the front leaves the users at large wondering. This is one reason the RT branch, that gets briefings from RT occasionally and publicity from Florion pretty regularly in various social media, appears to be moving forward , arguably away from the core.

The talk of " merge this workbench with that one" and "UI this and UI that" is simply a moot issue since in some cases. For example, Draft being merged with Sketcher is far larger than "oh, just take some of those tools and some of those tools and deprecate those legacies", they are from different stages of the overall development of the product, were conceived to address somewhat different problem paradigms, and by different developers. In others like Surface and Curves, are each the product of a single persons mind and may or may not be practical to merger (and in this case presented y those authors as completely experimental). The UI discussion is subjective and there is no committee or single person spearheading any particular effort, thus just like the list of workbenches, it is a bit like herding cats.

This is pretty much the the unfortunate MO of opensource, except where guiding organizations provide oversight (i.e. Blender) or something like Ardour, where the author remains in active control of the direction and design.
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Cekuhnen
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Re: where do you see FreeCAD main focus go towards?

Post by Cekuhnen »

Yeah the blender foundation does in deed streamline the development very well. I think it is save to say that this is the foundation of blenders success a s recent increasing acceptance in the professional industry.

I am actually curious about what Realthunder all tries to address.
Sofar I saw improvements to the sketcher (missing tools) and TNP.

It is concerning to read in a recent ist thread that a common task like extruding with draft fails very quickly.

I guess based on what modeling tools you need FC can deliver or not.

The slogan “ FC will be done when it is done “ seems very fitting.
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