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I thought I would knock some dust off my drafting skills after a small chat with @captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works
Seeing this image on the tutorial made me realize, FreeCAD seems to be a Technical Geometry Super-Suite. It makes sense that CAD would grow to include all of these things. But I thought sharing the initial perspective of some one who hasn't looked at this stuff in about 18 years might be interesting.
Granted I'm not actually familiar with most of this stuff, and none of it from the POV of FreeCAD. If this can deliver 10% of what I'm looking at, I'm in for a treat.
FreeCAD is fairly good. Some of the controls are a bit wonky, but that is just a minor gripe. If you are starting on FreeCAD, that doesn't matter so much. FreeCAD is good to know if you design components for KiCAD as well.
Parametric modeling is fucking awesome, btw. I am not quite sure how old that concept is though.
Pretty old, I'd say 30 years. It's what made pro/e, one of the first 3d cad systems, so famous within Boeing.
All 3D modeling software has absolutely terrible controls. I'm not sure there's a right way to do it through a 2D interface.
I have seen people use pens and tablets for sculpting in Blender so that is an option. For my CAD work I do have a SpaceMouse but that is only really useful for large projects.
Until we get holographic projection (Iron Man style) I am not quite sure what a 3D system would look like, TBH.
At least a decade, probably more
Even Freecad is well over a decade old. Opencascade is over 20.
I've been only doing cad for about 10 years so my knowledge is somewhat limited. I was talking about parametrics specifically. I should have made that clear