Recently I’ve been having feelings about moving away from Fusion 360. The combination of cloud app / filesystem and their demonstrated willingness to remove features and add arbitrary limitations (eg. 10 editable model limit) makes me feel uneasy about using it. To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it. If you’ve ever rented a house you’ll know the feeling - you quite don’t feel like it’s really your home, if the landlord wants to make renovate or redecorate you don’t have any choice and you could be evicted at any moment.
So I tried FreeCAD. At first, I have to say that it felt a little like stepping out of a spaceship (Fusion) and banging rocks together like a caveman. It’s not that you can’t do (most) of the same things as an enterprise CAD package, but the killer feature of Fusion is the level of intuitiveness and “it just works” that makes FreeCAD seem like trying to write Latin.
After a week of on-and-off learning I was not sure I wanted to continue. Even after getting comfortable with the basics, frustration levels would spike to 11 sometimes. The main issue I kept running into was that altering a previous feature would break everything that came after, requiring a varying amount of work to fix. The FreeCAD wiki suggests ways to mitigate this but many of them are un-intuitive and/or inconvenient. After some googling this seems to be caused by a pretty difficult to solve issue called the “Topological Naming Problem” (where FreeCAD can’t keep track of surfaces / edges / vertexes in a stable fashion when features are changed). Then I came across this blog post that pointed out a fix has actually been developed earlier this year. A developer by the name of RealThunder has created a fork of FreeCAD called “Link Branch” which can track topology in a (more) stable fashion.
I tried this branch and was blown away by how much more usable it is. Not only can it handle changes to past features almost perfectly, but I can create multiple bodies from a single sketch (not possible before) and there are other UI tweaks that make creating features easier such as the ability to preview fillets and chamfers at the same time as selecting their edges. I’m not totally sure which of these features are unique to Link branch vs which might be pre-release in the main branch, but certainly the topology naming fix is unique to Link.
So if you have tried FreeCAD in the past and been frustrated, or if Fusion’s past free license changes or price increases are making you uneasy, give the Link Branch a try! Downloads are available in the releases page.
Fusion 360 is amazing in the Getting Shit Donetm department, which is the weak point of FreeCAD. I have managed to steer through the byzantine UI of FreeCAD to create a CAD model, but it needed support by someone who has spent years in that application to get the more complex stuff, and even he didn’t exactly know how to achieve it, and that’s on top of me having participated in a 16 hour workshop on how to use FreeCAD. For Fusion 360, I’ve watched a few 5 minute videos on their official channel and that’s it, everything else I was able to accomplish through just looking at the UI.
I learned Fusion 360 before FreeCAD, so it’s not just that I had prior experience in another similar tool.
I think the basic problem with FreeCAD is that it’s a collection of tool benches written by different people who don’t talk to each other. They have overlapping responsibilities while still having vastly different feature sets and don’t integrate with each other most of the time. So, if you want to create a model, you first have to plan ahead to understand what kind of features it’s going to have, and based on that, you have to decide which collection of tool benches you have to pick. More than once I picked the wrong one in the start and then had to do everything all over again in the different one once I ran into a dead end.
Fusion 360 feels like it was written by a single team with a single vision, and everything fits together.