FreeCAD & Ondsel Topological Naming Problem Fix! Exclusive News And Update! 

... and the reason why other folks - myself included - have been using the RealThunder branch for years.

@@petergamache5368 It was an option, but it's a lot to ask of a layman to install a development branch. Having those changes make their way into the mainline makes it a lot easier to recommend.

Yep, that! In many cases, TNP can by avoided by sticking to "old-school proper modelling principles" (As in: Use independent planes. Don't glue base sketches for new features onto existing feature geometry). But fillets and chamfers rely on glueing-stuff-to-feature-geometry by design and there is no feasible way around it.

And especially frustrating if you don't understand what's going on. If you have multiple fillet and chamfer steps, changing the first step would break the later steps. So many rounds of rework.

@@jeremiahrex Especially frustrating since fillets are the last thing I do in my workflow, and FreeCAD is pretty arbitrary about them. I often find myself having to select individual lines to get a face to work at all. Any change to any earlier step and it's re-clicking the same 50 lines again.

Yes, this is where I run into problems all the time. When a parameter in a model needs to be changed somewhere this often results in chamfers applied later moving from one edge to another. And in most cases that breaks the model. I have started using separate chamfer steps for each type of chamfer. This helps a bit. If one of the chamfers end up on an incorrect edge, I just clear all chamfer edges in the step and reselect the correct ones. Not a big deal if you have four edges with the same chamfer value. A monumental task if you collect 20 chamfers with different values in the same operation. But I would naturally prefer a fix that stops renaming existing planes.

@@keinschwein8467 I am always sticking to “old-school modeling principles” and I am affected by TNP in Assembly WB every time I modify one of the parts. If you think dealing with messed up chamfers is a problem, try to rearrange complex assembly after modifying of one of the parts.

Such a wholesome message haha

I think it's too far gone for that. A complete reworking would be needed, with years of development.

I think you're wrong on that. Its really not that far off. Years of development sure. It's being built by a tiny team of developers mostly donating their time, what do you expect? It's already far better than ANY commercial software on account of not having control over your designs. If the community could just get over themselves and be a little more positive, that could only help.

@@jeffersonsharp2292 It's not that far off, and years of development? Doesn't grok.

@@jeffersonsharp2292 I'm with you on the free part, and I love FreeCAD and have never used any other parametric modelling app. I'm eternally grateful for its existence and acknowledge the incredible thing the developers have done. But it's a simple truth: the user experience is a mess, and in order to fix that part, a full rewrite will be needed.

at the point where i'm trying to show people i like how to use freecad and it's pretty complex to describe all the possible outcomes of even simple operations, best so far is like: "freecad is a frontend to opencascade, opencascade can do anything, any geometry problem you might have, it can do it, but as a frontend freecad can't always accommodate the result of what opencascade does for an operation, there are many cases not even anticipated by the authors of freecad in any real way", trying to keep them focused on solving their problems instead of getting mad

I know; I was annoyed he only addressed half the conversation

Feature freeze was announced for the middle of May (next week) some time ago on the forum. They just have to confirm this date during the next meeting.

The customization and themes you can add help make the newer version much better UI wise. I think Onsdel I working on better UI / UX

Bear in mind that TNP is not perfectly solved, not in any commercial projects and not in realthunder's version. The most common instances, yes.

@@KnugLidi I imagine the only way to solve it "completely" would be some pretty hefty AI that tries to figure out what exactly you mean when stuff moves around. But, still... just assigning a UUID that never changes to each object (which I think is what rt's branch does) makes things soooo much better for me. Right now my biggest pain points are bugs.. segfaults (especially in Path / CAM), broken fillets and chamfers, and this absolutely nasty one in the build I'm running where if you attach any sketch to a face from a different body, all 3D operations will be permanently fused with that body. I've spent hours trying to break that link to no avail; if a sketch loses an attachment and you reattach it, that part is forever unusable/inseparable up to that point and you've gotta delete it and recreate it from scratch. I'm not sure if it's just rt's branch yet, but I'll open some bug reports when I get some time off my current project. Still, all in all, the progress has been truly remarkable.

@@GordLamb The 'fixes' used aren't perfect, but they are a huge gain, certainly. Some high level math gurus put videos out explaining why it can't be truley solved, but only managed. And it looks like the management in FC is close to matching commercial software in this regard.

Thank you so much for the kind comment. Glad you enjoyed

What if I say something in Dutch: FreeCAD heeft een sterke geur. Het is complex en doet net net wat jij wil waardoor je wordt afgeleid en niet hetgeen wat jij wil doen kan doen. Would you mind? Or can you say it in English?

@@gvdschoot OK. I'll try to say it in English. When I bought myself a 3D printer, I thought about choosing a design environment. I wanted something simple, accessible and easy. Of the free programs, Freecad is the best. I wouldn't say he's interesting. It is the same as any Linux distribution. It has its own problems, which are solved very slowly. This is a problem with any open source software. Very often it is very difficult and painful to use it. He just doesn't know how to do some obvious things that are available in commercial programs. But I've already spent a decent amount of time studying it and I don't want to study other software. I can only wish the project high rates of development and progress.

Personally I have never followed those recommendations. Inserting the datum planes adds more complexity and I have always stuck to attaching sketches to geometry as it's traditional CAD practice and freeCAD allows you to do it. Through it you learn how to manage the topo issue. Also my tutorials stay current when this problem is mitigated against. You have to be careful as a beginner, there is a lot of misinformation out their of what is caused by topological naming and what is caused by knowledge / understanding gaps.

@@MangoJellySolutions Thanks for your reply. As a teacher myself, I'd like to congratulate you on your courses: imho, they''re very well structured, good to follow (especially for newcomers), and have plenty of good examples of very good didactics!

Glad to hear that this issue has been resolved! It must be a huge relief, especially considering how crucial it was in your search for a viable alternative to Fusion 360. Here's to smoother workflows and more productive days ahead!

Amazing work, hates off to all those involved. I can year the CAD refugees stopping their regular payments as we speak. It's going to be a bight future.

Thank you kindly 😊😊

Pretty much the same case is discussed on the FreeCAD wiki page about TNP.

It did just those changes were thought to take a long time to be merged into the current branch. Sounds like we may be getting official freecad with realthunder's toponaming fixes

Developers have just released the time line. The new version of v1 will be released approx mid July.

Pads are different to extrudes as they include a boolean operation, a union, to keep the model solid. Extrudes allow for surfaces, shells, solids and compounds defending on the arrangement of geometry included.

Why? It's a nomenclature from CATIA by which FreeCAD was inspired ;-)

That's not a bug. A line intersecting a circle does have two solutions after all. So it's not really a degree of freedom, but rather an ambiguity. But I know what you mean. It sure is annoying, especially since you can't add an additional constraint to force the right solution, because from FreeCAD's point of view that sketch would be overconstrained then. This is not limited to the example you've given by the way. The same can happen with angle or length constraints. E. g. you have point B constrained 10mm to the right of point A. Now move point A some 30 or more to the right and point B is no suddenly constrained 10mm to the left of point A (so point B switched side). This usually does not happen when you drag point A with the mouse (because the constraints are continuously applied while dragging). But on the other hand it is almost 100% reproducible if point A is from external geometry and that external geometry move by that much. FreeCAD needs some kind of hinting system. Something that's not really a constraint, but a hint for which solution to pick if the solver has multiple to choose.

Use angles instead of horizontal / vertical constraints and you will never see this problem again

This was just one simple example for the effects of TNP. Looks like you don’t use assembly WB. That is where TNP has huge impact. You add or remove a hole in one part and the whole assembly goes out of whack and you spend time repositioning parts.

I've gotten so used to working around it, I'm going to have to relearn the more direct workflow.

The Tip of the Tree is always the last feature/operation created unless you select an ancient feature with the mouse right click and choose for that specific feature to be the Tip. The auto update in the Sketcher Solver panel must be ticked or as I prefer assign it permanently within Edit Menu-Preferences-Sketcher...

No, it's not yet fully implemented.

Which Assembly workbench ? The new built-in one or one of the old add-on ones like Assembly4 ?

@@Gumball_W all my models are done in A4 so I have to continue with it.

@@rok1475 Then there’s a problem because Zolko (A4 dev) was upset that one of the changes in 0.22 dev broke some stuff in his workbench so he stopped following this dev version and even added a warning that one should use 0.21 stable instead.

@@Gumball_W thank you for the warning.

While what RealThunder did was and is fantastic it wasn't in a state to be merged in a project that is managed by more than a single person, when you code in your own branch you tend to cut corners in the sense that you do not write enough annotations, code formatting standards, etc. Also RealThunder branch is separate from the main branch which over time diverged from RealThunder's. The TPN thing is not a trivial thing to address, you can't just copy and paste from one branch to another.

@@sillonbono3196 I read the original article on Ondsel regarding the realThunder merger and now I understand. In the meantime, Mango has also released a new video where the real exclusive news is already there - the TNP solution in dev version 0.22 - And it's awesome!

@@sillonbono3196 I read the original article on Ondsel regarding the realThunder merger and now I understand. In the meantime, Mango has also released a new video where the real exclusive news is already there - the TNP solution in dev version 0.22 - And it's awesome!

@@sillonbono3196 I've already read the article about the complexity of merging solutions from realThunder. I already understand it, and in the meantime Mango has released a new video where the current not-yet-public version is already shown which already contains the solution - mitigation - of the TNP problem - and that's the real exclusive news :-) Will there be more description somewhere on what exactly the mitigation of the problem means, and in what situations will we still need to be careful?

Great news