Hello!
Wonder myself if there any Linux available and\or open-source CAD that can be analogue to Fusion 360? Or maybe anyone had attempt to make similar one to Fusion 360?
FreeCAD seems to be very unfriendly for me as daily user to get jump into 3D design world. Fusion 360 on the opposite - very easy to manage to intuitively and learn fastly
Thanks
P.S. Yes, beside Blender maybe?
Personally, I use FreeCAD. I kinda like the unintuitivness a bit. You have to watch a few tutorials and read the wiki or manual, and getting into the whole workbench stuff and what can be used where thing. But in the end you are less likely to mess up so badly as two of my classmates on a 3D printing related subject once did. They extruded literal side planes only and used poorly made sketch with no calibration or constraints whatsoever. They also used wrong tab in Fusion for that, so they wasted like 4 hours, because the software had no reason to warn them and they had no reason to look for answers. In FreeCAD, they wouldn’t even get past creation of the sketch. I didn’t when I tried it out for the first time. : )
Also, I find some UI elements in FreeCAD to be better than in Fusion. The only way that I could find to have some variables was to open a dialog window that I can’t just deselect and then come back when needed. In FreeCAD I can either use Spreadsheet or VarSet.
And the best thing was performance. My laptop was really struggling to run Fusion even in a window that was barely 720p. FreeCAD has no issue runnin on 4k external screen even though I only have integrated Intel GPU.
For me personally, FreeCAD is the winner. But feel free to use whatever you like. There’s even a project that aims to run Fusion on Linux. You can check that if you prefer that. Although a friend of mine had some trouble getting it to work 100%.
Have you seen the tutorials for FreeCAD by MangoJelly?https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCUWhaOxsRk_5oPPq00_Y7Dw
FreeCAD is the most complete open source CAD project you’ll find. I agree it is a steep learning curve, but it pays off to work through it, if you want to 3D print your designs.
If you want to create 3D models for games, or what not Blender is, as you say a great option.
I watched a tutorial for FreeCAD. Step 1 was “click this button”. After half an hour of searching I couldn’t fucking find that button and that was that.
Sounds like either the video you watched was badly made enough that they didnt even use the out of the box configuration, or you were using a completely different freecad version than in the video. Either way that hardly sounds like freecads fault. I watched MangoJellys guides and have had zero issues making models.
I wasn’t implying that it was their fault. Just sharing my experience.
Fair enough, I just don’t want others to read that and assume the software is unreasonably hard to learn.
If you haven’t tried FreeCAD and are just going off sentiment you’ve seen online, I’d recommend you give it a try. It’s a good program, just a different workflow. Lots of people just refuse to learn it, instead trying to force a workflow from whatever software they used before. When I was a complete beginner, I was able to make multiple functional prints in a couple of hours with MangoJelly’s videos. I was also trying both it and Onshape at the time, and preferred FreeCAD in the end.
It’s really your only option besides Blender if you want something FOSS. The most recent release also improved a ton of things, and it’ll just keep improving.
You could also take a look at AstoCAD, a soft fork of FreeCAD by one of the maintainers. It’s 4€/month a month to get the binary, otherwise you’ll have to build it yourself. The money of course goes towards helping develop FreeCAD. The main upside is UI polish, but that comes at the cost of having a different UI than pretty much any tutorial online, so I’d still recommend at least starting with FreeCAD.
Edit: fixed wrong word, grammar
OpenSCAD is a great program, but it’s not like blender or fusion 360. the input is a text file, and you need to describe the object you want to model as geometrical shapes in text. It also only renders when you tell it to, not constantly.
But if you are willing to dive into it, you can get great results. There are libraries available for threads and gears and curbed shapes and such.
It does take some getting used to, even more so if you have never done any programing, but it’s FOSS and can create the same output as the graphical-menu counterparts.
Edit: I had originally posted a link to some stl files I made, but my read name is on there so I removed it.
OpenSCAD is like programming a model. You can do pretty cool things with it, but it’s not necessarily intuitive to most. See also: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/various/editable-bike-pump-mount
OpenSCAD is super fun and I have built things in it too. It is just for the modeling and doesn’t do tool path stuff like fusion360; but I think you could import models into freeCAD and do tool paths there.
Oh really? I had no idea that fusion360 did toolpath stuff. Oops.
I used to model in openSCAD and do tool paths in fusion. Good combo for the most part, but there were some issues like cutting slots that never worked well; the slot always had to be wider than the tool. Fusion works better on its own proprietary models than on STLs.
Sometimes the choices are just jank and proprietary. There’s great competitive foss software for many things, but I don’t haven’t seen one for 3d cad.
I moved to OnShape since its web based I can use it in linux without issues. FreeCAD is good, but it randomly was slow on my laptop and I cant figure out whats wrong :(
