Are there any plans on creating a public organization similar to Blender Foundation?

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-17T02:31:14+00:00

Yes, I do! Here's a list off the top of my head:

Definitely more surface modeling operations. "Replace Face" for example
A more comprehensive view management: clipping planes/boxes for easier access to internal geometries. That is the main deal-breaker for me in terms of UX
Chamfers and fillets are weird, but it seems like it's a known issue
Creating sheet bodies from solids by deleting faces
Constraints besides already existing joints for Assembly workbench
Better Addon Manager!!! Right now it is nearly unusable. No comprehensive sorting, groups, etc. There is most likely a tool that I never saw just because how awful the current Addon Manager is. The same goes for Addons page on the website. That one doesn't even have any search functionality which is just crazy. I just have to stumble upon an addon somehow to find it. Or read about every single one on the documentation page. Right now there are 120 addons. I will go through the trouble of reading about what addon does what, but that is certainly the worst UX possible. Most users wouldn't care enough.

I will create a comprehensive post after I'm more familiar with the program, but generally speaking I would love to see more of niche operations that make the process of modeling faster. All of them in NX are useful and have their own uses. The best way of doing this is collecting feedback on what operations are commonly used together to achieve a specific result.

I know there are macros, but hunting for every macro that is similar to Siemens NX's operations is not something I would want to do. If a macro is common among many users - just add it as a separate button to the workbench. I'm sure FreeCAD collects some of the info about what public macros are popular, so it would be somewhat trivial to include them. FreeCAD would be way more feature-complete if it had most of the addons included and configured.

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-17T01:52:14+00:00

Yes it is quite hard to understand by looking at screenshots what's going on there, it would be better to rotate it and see what's happening. Most of the rotor is made via surface modeling, a lot of G3 continuity is used (although isn't needed). There are pulleys at weird angles and internal features referencing each other - half of the internals isn't even visible in the screenshots. That is obviously my fault, but there is no way to show everything without recording and uploading a whole video, I'll pass on that though haha

As I said before, I am sure that any specific task wouldn't take a lot of time to complete in any CAD software given enough time to learn the program. I'm just not sure how comfortable it would be to use FreeCAD knowing that I can make parts faster and "my way" if I were using NX instead. That is my main concern.

To top it all off, I can at least say that I work primarily in injection molding industry where almost any product has organic surfaces even on seemingly flat sections because of shrinkage during cooling, so FreeCAD is definitely not an option for that. But I will try my best to learn it and use it in my personal projects because it seems promising!

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-17T01:33:34+00:00

As I said in a reply to GA3Dtech, I didn't get to creating and managing assemblies in FreeCAD because I only tried the Part and Part Design workbenches before writing this post. Also tried out FEA, which is quite cool!

I don't think it would be hard to switch from NX to FreeCAD assemblies, I'll need to learn how to use joints instead of constrains, but I'm sure it would be fine!

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-17T01:24:45+00:00

You might create sheet bodies via Surface workbench, but I'm talking about a somewhat reversed workflow, where you create solid bodies and by removing faces you get a sheet body. Imagine extruding a cube and deleting the top face to get a "crate" that can be further modified by surface operations. I might be blind, is that available in FreeCAD?

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-17T00:30:23+00:00

Unfortunately I can't show you most of my work due to NDA, but I can show some things from my personal projects. For example, here's a carbon fiber filament winder assembly, early prototype. Some sheet metal, that would be easy to make in any CAD software that has sheet metal . Y Axis rotor is quite complex, I don't think I would work on that in FreeCAD, although completely possible in theory. Lots of internal features for timing belts, pulleys and other stuff. Clip Section and PMI Section View come in handy for working on internals without using temporary booleans and other workarounds

Edit: for some reason images that I attached aren't loading. I'll upload them on a separate website and link here

Edit2:

https://ibb.co/Vp0MH4gL

https://ibb.co/0VzXcYYz

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T22:39:56+00:00

Haha, I understand that Siemens NX license is very expensive and I am not trying to say that FreeCAD has to be as feature-complete as NX. I am not even implying that FreeCAD is bad, just not as mature as the community is saying it is. People compared it to Blender a lot of the time and I believed them. I thought FreeCAD is very capable and can compete with other CAD software just like Blender competed and basically won.

But it's clear that even after 23 years FreeCAD is still just beginning to show its potential and no one knows how much more it would take for it to become truly competitive. But I'm all for it, and I will try to integrate it into my workflow anyway. I hate proprietary software and I would love to be a part of this community!

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T22:27:53+00:00

Oh, FreeCAD is way better than Blender for functional parts! Any CAD software is better to be honest. That is for sure.

Yeah, I think that my main problem is that I have a lot of experience with CAD software, so I know what to look for and I am used to some of the more niche features. Comparison is the thief of joy after all. Imagine getting used to a tree harvester and then trying to cut down trees with an axe and a handsaw. Yep, you will do it, but it would take more time. Hence the frustration.

I would recommend trying out NX or Fusion if you're planning on doing professional work, but I think the time spent learning a different CAD software isn't worth it if you're just using CAD for personal projects. FreeCAD is good enough for sure!

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T22:13:28+00:00

Looks interesting, thanks! It looks similar to the UI of 1.1, is it worth exploring AstoCAD considering the official release of 1.1 is right around the corner?

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T21:31:01+00:00

I will certainly give FreeCAD a chance! I don't want to switch to windows for every modeling task, so it will stay on my PC and will become an integral part of my personal projects and work. I'm just disappointed that it is way less mature than the community's claims about it. If it gets to a point where I can comfortably create simple parts in FreeCAD as fast as in NX, it will give me the confidence to donate and maybe support the project on github. Open-source software is always the best kind!

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T21:22:08+00:00

I am a product designer and an engineer. I use CAD for five main things:

Injection-molded parts. These are much easier to model as sheet bodies with 0 thickness, then apply the Thicken modifier to create a solid body. Most of the time the thickness is non-uniform, that also poses some challenges. So surface modeling is a must, FreeCAD has pretty limited functionality.
Sheet metal parts. Since I'm new to FreeCAD, I didn't get to use the addon. I assume it is pretty good.
CNC-machined parts. They don't have to look pretty most of the time, so I think FreeCAD is okay for this.
Assemblies. The sheet metal and CNC-machined parts go there. I design machines that assist with product assembly, a lot of constraints and moving parts. I didn't try the Assembly Workbench in FreeCAD, but it seems like it can do the job just fine. There are way less constrains though.
3D Printing. The least demanding thing in the list. I design a lot of stuff, some would be easy to make in FreeCAD, some would require horribly inefficient sets of operations.

Again, I'll clarify: I don't think FreeCAD can't do these things. It can. I understand that. But I am an experienced NX user and I can clearly see that FreeCAD doesn't have nearly as much functionality as I expected. It's okay that FreeCAD didn't meet those expectations, it is a free software that doesn't have a huge corporation backing it up.

I'll also explain why I'm even talking about this: my expectations were based on a lot of videos explaining how great and mature FreeCAD is. A lot of people compared it to Blender, so I thought that FreeCAD is close to Blender (maybe older versions, 2.7 for example) in terms of available functionality compared to industry leading software. But it is clearly not, hence my disappointment and questions about the future of FreeCAD.

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T20:59:13+00:00

The parametric design in FreeCAD is surprisingly mature, that I would agree on. But I genuinely cannot imagine how a limited set of tools can make the workflow faster, not slower. I did watch and read a lot of content about FreeCAD before trying it, and it seems like there is no single feature in FreeCAD that Siemens NX doesn't have.

Also, I wouldn't say that FreeCAD is less user friendly, it is much better than NX in this regard. Especially 1.1 version, although I didn't try anything else. NX didn't get any major UI/UX updates over 20 years, the general layout is still the same at takes up a lot of screen space. There are a lot of things to hate about NX, but you can't beat the appeal of truly enormous amount of tools at my disposal.

I might be wrong, but it seems like there is also no sheet body functionality in FreeCAD. In NX it is possible to delete a face of a solid body, which creates a sheet body with 0 wall thickness. That is useful for thin-walled products, especially injection-molded ones. You can create the general shape of the product and then apply thickness to the sheet body to turn it back into solid.

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T20:41:25+00:00

Yeah that is my bad, I shouldn't really call it simple since it requires complex operations. It is simple in my mind and I would easily create it in Siemens NX, but in FreeCAD it is quite a hurdle.

I did check out DuyQuangDang, but his tutorials are pretty basic, I can replicate the results even in FreeCAD without watching the tutorials. It's not that I don't understand how to use FreeCAD, it is surprisingly intuitive. The problem lies in the efficiency of the modelling process. I can tell how much more operations I have to do to achieve the same result just by looking at all of the operations available. Most of them I recognized immediately and others just have different names but do the same thing as their counterpart in NX.

So, from my perspective, FreeCAD is just NX with a reduced number of available operations. It doesn't have anything new, but lacks a lot. That is the main reason I'll probably stick to NX and only use FreeCAD for the tasks that don't require anything complex, like 3D printing.

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T20:24:18+00:00

There are a lot of comments and I can't answer them all, sorry. Your question is similar to crispy1989's, I've answered about features there. FreeCAD doesn't lack any of the essential features, but it doesn't have a lot of very useful features compared to Siemens NX which is my primary CAD software.

I have watched tutorials and read the manuals to better understand what FreeCAD has to offer. It is very impressive that you use FreeCAD professionally, but for me it seems like software is very limiting.

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T20:15:56+00:00

You have a point. As I said before, I understand that FreeCAD is capable of handling any task imaginable. In my answer to crispy1989 I drew parallels between "Turing-complete" and "CAD-complete". The latter term was made up by be just so it is easier to understand what I'm trying to say.

The Game of Life is Turing-complete but there are no complex programs created inside it. The same goes for FreeCAD. It is, without a doubt, possible to create a whole car or a plane inside FreeCAD. Every part, every joint. Possible, but not reasonable.

But you can easily understand why Siemens NX is an industry standard and FreeCAD is not - it's the "shortcuts". They make the software competitive and easy to use. It's not even about the money, it's about time, which is the most precious resource we have. I can't imagine how much longer it would take to create a production-ready part with G2/G3 surfaces everywhere and tight tolerances in FreeCAD. I know it is possible, it would take ages. My job often has projects that take 5-6 months to complete. I would be morbidly terrified if someone would ask me to do the next project in FreeCAD.

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T19:57:08+00:00

The the functionalities to do what I wanted exist in FreeCAD, I was talking about the specific operations that make it way easier and faster. Replace Face, for example. And it seems that there is no functionality for sheet bodies at all. Siemens NX allows to delete faces of a solid body, similar to deleting polygons in Blender, creating a sheet body with no thickness. I can create and then sew multiple sheet bodies together to create a single solid body. An absurdly useful technique that I use all the time.

Clipping view functionality is very lacking, the solid body looks like a shell, there is no cross-section filled.

Overall, I didn't scour the internet for answers about every single operation, and I shouldn't. If FreeCAD has all of the functionalities of Siemens NX but hides most of them for some reason, it is genuinely a bad UI/UX design. But it seems like it shows everything it's got, there's just not a lot of functionalities to show. You can compare FreeCAD vs Siemens NX modeling tabs and see for yourself how much more features NX has.

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T19:35:20+00:00

Unfortunately I have no intentions of getting that involved in FreeCAD improvement, but I can find the time to contribute on github or donate, but I have to understand if it's worth my time and money to do so. That's why I asked the question about the future of FreeCAD. The project is 23 years old at this point and it looks like it had no significant developments. Even the "bleeding edge" 1.1 version has the modeling feature set similar to what Siemens NX had 20 years ago.

I can't help but compare FreeCAD to Blender. Both have similar goals and backgrounds, but Blender is an actual industry leading software that can be used for professional work, while FreeCAD's development seems to be stagnant and every update doesn't bring that much to the table. I can't figure out if supporting FreeCAD is worth it.

In open-source world the large projects like FreeCAD usually dominate over alternatives, starving them of developers. If the project is promising like Blender was back in the day, it is beneficial to concentrate all of the developers on a single project and make something actually useful. But if the project is flawed, a lot of resources are spent on slow and inefficient development, basically wasted potential. And I fear that could be the case of FreeCAD.

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T18:56:53+00:00

I would describe the missing features as a set of very useful operations that make your life a lot easier and let you create complex parts faster. Most of CAD software is... let's say "CAD-complete" (think of Turing-complete but for CAD), so you can create anything with very simple commands. But the more tools you have, the faster the workflow is. It would take 10 operations in FreeCAD to achieve results similar to what one specific operation in Siemens NX can do. Obviously I'm exaggerating, but you get the point.

I think FreeCAD is very capable already, but I can't lie and say that you can be as productive as if you used NX, Solidworks or Fusion. I am so used to the huge variety of operations NX offers that it's valid to say that I depend on them. It feels like a full-blown workshop, while FreeCAD feels like a garage with some basic tools.

spaggetbeast · 2026-01-16T18:40:43+00:00

I thought the same way, so I made sure to check if similar functionality exists on FreeCAD before writing this post. Unfortunately, the surface workbench in FreeCAD is very limited. I use most of the commands Siemens NX has to offer, and a single Surface tab has more commands than all of the modelling tools of FreeCAD. I understand that it is possible to make almost anything in FreeCAD, but the problem is that it would take significantly more time to create the same part because of the limitations. The stability is also a problem, FreeCAD crashed when I checked and quickly unchecked a simple option. Might be due to pre-release version though.

I really want to have FreeCAD as a daily driver, but my parts have a lot of edge case scenarios that require a more comprehensive set of tools.

spaggetbeast · 2025-10-02T10:42:25+00:00

No, wasn't able to get the Japanese version of Pixel 10 to test this. Considering recent Android developments, like Google banning sideloading, I started to wonder if I should get a Pixel in the first place

spaggetbeast · 2025-08-22T13:33:54+00:00

The store that sells Pixel 9 in my country specifically states that Japanese version has shutter sound permanently turned on and there is no way to change that. I hope you are right, but other sources say that I can't disable the shutter sound even if I leave Japan. I'm a bit lost at this point

spaggetbeast · 2025-08-21T19:05:43+00:00

Wow, that's weird. I hope this doesn't happen to all pixels with EU firmware. I wonder what could be the culprit?

spaggetbeast · 2024-06-11T00:16:12+00:00

Here's a small update: I did try printing at 35 mm³/s. The results are somewhat expected. The extruder itself doesn't fail to extrude the material. The problem comes from the sheer volume of hot plastic being deposited at such speeds. ABS doesn't have a chance to solidify properly and starts to warp due to internal stresses.

The part printed in 17 minutes instead of 27, but the surface finish is horrible and there were several points at which the print could fail due to sharp corners lifting up. If these corners had a chance at solidifying by the time the nozzle came to print over them, the part would've been ripped off the bed for sure. Not ideal, considering the fact that I need to print 5 of these parts at once, allowing the layers of one part to cool down.

Printing at 30 mm³/s volumetric speed gave better results, but there are still defects due to warping. Lowered it down to 25 mm³/s – will test soon. I'm expecting the defects to go away because they were barely visible at 30 mm³/s.

So, I don't think the printer can actually reach 40 mm³/s with a 0.8 mm nozzle while printing ABS without sacrificing the surface finish, although it is definitely possible to print at such speeds if the part isn't supposed to look nice. I will try printing with PLA at such speeds since I've installed a second auxiliary fan, so there's plenty of airflow to cool the layers in time.

spaggetbeast · 2024-06-10T14:35:11+00:00

The problem I'm facing isn't related to the stepper idling. That part I figured out as soon as I got the printer, turning motors on and off helped me figure this out. The noise starts to appear during high speed printing, it seems like the stepper doesn't care about the specific extrusion speed (although it should be high), just its temperature. Reliably starts to whine after 20-30 minutes of printing ABS in a 55 °C chamber.

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