FreeCAD Version 0.18 Release Trailer 

But the feature "sketch projection on complex surface" is still missing.... 😞

Akio Saitou a

Indeed! That "music" hurts my soul.

It seems nowadays everything has to be a video. Just reading the release notes takes less time and is more instructive.

This video was really just a release teaser. Documentation always seems to lag in open source projects.

I agree and hope there will be an emphasis on improving the workflow and user interface for 0.19. They, or we as a community, could also work on making the progress more visible on RU-vid with regular development updates. It has worked really well for Blender and I think FreeCAD development as a whole could really benefit from the same kind of popular exposure, although CAD software may not be as mainstream at the moment.

the music is awesome

Blender is not intended for mechanical assemblies or engineering drawings.

@@adisharr Maybe for reverse engineering or extracting information of footage if one is a RC builder or other modeler. I mean footage is not orthographic. But for engineering parts not really. That long boxy example remembers me when I tried to customize the OpenDrop design for a camera module. (Using Blender) I even have no access to lasercutting or so.

Make sure the outside perimeter of your your sketch forms a closed loop (no gaps). It's easy to miss one. Grab on to the various segments and drag them around a bit and you'll find if there's a hole. If that doesn't help, post on the forum and attach your file and freecad info and someone will certainly help.

i kept trying to join the lines, maybe missed some, looking for a replacement for sketchup, so far the demo's look good.

FreeCAD has no official assembly workbench yet. There are a couple available via the add-on manager. I use assembly4

There's an add-on workbench for sheetmetal that has some nice unfolding capability. Probably not a fit for what you describe but maybe a place to start

That's not an easy question to answer. FreeCAD is a very powerful piece of software with workbenches for doing a broad range of engineering related tasks. Some of those have very steep learning curves and others are quite straight-forward. If you want to design 2D panels and generate gcode to cut them, you will find FreeCAD very capable. 0.18 is now getting very dated. 0.19 will hopefully be released soon but you can run the daily builds of it now. Spend some time watching tutorials about the Part Design workbench and the sketcher for design. And look at the Path workbench for gcode generation.

@@sliptonic thank you so much for your time and answer! I'll look into those tutorials this week!

I haven't seen anyone attempt that specific use-case but you'd get a better answer asking on the FreeCAD forum.

For architectural drawing, you're going to make heavy use of the Arch and Draft workbenches. That's really not my area. Yorik Van Havre is one of the core developers of FreeCAD and especially the Arch workbench. He has an excellent arch tutorial playlist. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-N9K9YJxroc4.html

It does. lead in/out is done through a dressup and the current one doesn't have a task panel yet. So you add the dressup and then select it in the tree. The property pane shows all the adjustments that can be made including the length (radius).

I have a number of playlists related to FreeCAD but not a general tutorial.

ok give me ! @@sliptonic

It's called Dream Together by Nerook Xcent. It's Creative Commons (CC-BY) and there's an attribution at about 0:05.

creative commons ..great... thanks

The 3d surfacing operation in Path depends on opencamlib. Ocl license was changed last year and is now more compatible with freecad. But it didn't make the packaging deadline for Debian so installatuon is still manual. This will improve in the future. Also some additional improvement work is being done on the surface operation itself but that's not in 0.18.

The big change in version 0.18 was py3 and QT5. The add-on workbenches will also have to be updated. Many already have and some never will be. Assembly 2 is probably in the latter group. Check out A2Plus though. That's the assembly functionality shown in the video.

@@sliptonic It looks like Assembly 2 was replaced by A2Plus (there might be an Assembly 3 coming?). I fear that GDT will never be upgraded since it looks like it was written by a fromer graduate student for his thesis project.

FEM introduced lots of amazing stuff in 0.17 and the developers of the workbench chose to focus on stability in 0.18. So there wasn't much new 'eye-candy' for FEM this time around. That said, there's actually quite a few features and entire workbenches not represented in this video. In some cases, nobody stepped up to record content and in others the content was too difficult to represent in a fast 'trailer' video like this. Please check out the release notes for the full story on what's new.

I don't know what an .std format is either. Most 3D printer software applications look for an .stl file.

that was a typo. I was referring to an .stl file. I ran some projects through the .18 Freecad that worked on the .17 Freecad but the Cura software I use would load the files to make a gCode file.

I don't think that's exactly fair. It's just not possible to improve software while keeping it exactly the same. You're jumping from version 0.15 which was released in 2015 to version 0.18 released almost four years later and you're complaining about the changes being too drastic. There have been some really big changes but they occurred over the course of three huge versions that you didn't keep up with. By the way, we're close to releasing 0.19 which is an enormous improvement over 0.18 but those big changes require new concepts and ideas that must be learned. Fortunately RU-vid is full of tutorial videos to help learn.

This isn't meant to be a tutorial or a replacement for the release notes. I'm sure individual features and techniques will be covered in depth on this channel and others in the coming months. This is to celebrate a milestone release, make people aware that it's finally available and generate some interest.

@@sliptonic ok, fair enough.

Try clicking “pause”. This isn’t TV, you know.

Very much alive. Visit the FreeCAD forum to see the progress.

I do my videos in the stock UI because that's what new users will see. But many UI customizations are possible. Here's one that uses the linkstage3 build. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-s7O0gIvXnLU.html

@@sliptonic OH, I understand, That's a relief. Thanks for the clarification.

The "commit" in software development is the process of saving code change. You can imagine a new version is saved by "commit" to a versioning tool - program for tracking changes in software development process. Development team can easily identify what is recently changed and when such a change was commited by other developers working on particular parts of the same software project. www.wikiwand.com/en/Commit_(version_control)

FreeCAD is designed to build for the big 3 platforms. MacOS, Windows, Linux. Mobile is another story. The UI is not optimized for touch interface and no builds for mobile are maintained by the team. Perhaps one day.

There's an add on workbench. www.freecadweb.org/wiki/SheetMetal_Workbench

freecadweb.org has download links.

Thanks. It should be updated soon. The new packages and installers started appearing yesterday.

I don't use windows so I don't speak from experience but many users on the forum run windows 10 without issue

@glyn hodges I'm trying to understanding this video tutorial, But freecad is to difficult

"They"? "Hire"? You do realize this is an open-source project run by volunteers. There's no money. There's very little central control. The source code is available. If the 'idiotic' feature names bother you, you can change them yourself rather than just complaining about it.

In what way?

@@superduperbjarne pov ray or lux core render

Export to Blender and use Cycles. The best renderer around!

But topography is very bad

@@rana-3d I don’t understand what you mean.

My personal area of interest is CNC/CAM so I argue with the statement that it isn't useful without paper. That said, FreeCAD has an excellent TechDraw workbench for producing Technical drawings. I did an entire video series on TechDraw earlier this year.

@@sliptonic I just looked and the 2019 update added layout features. I need to give it another look.

Sorry. Windows 7 is the minimum supported version. You realize that XP went end-of-life five years ago, right? Like no security updates since then? If you're really attached to the old hardware, you can get a linux distro to run on it and it will run FreeCAD.

That is a suggestion to be considered. Thanks for the reply.

This is not a teaching video. This is a release trailer. The point is to showcase some of what's new in the release. There are tons of great videos that teach individual features and give them the time they deserve.

Please read the title. This isn't meant to be a demo or tutorial. It's just a video trailer to generate interest in the release. When a release occurs it's impossible to cover every feature in under five minutes. If you think you can do better, we're getting close to another release and could use a trailer for it

Will you be sending a pull request with improvements soon, supporting a developer's patreon, or editing the wiki? Or is your contribution only limited to negative comments on RU-vid?

@@sliptonic oh the snark. The last time I tried to join the dev team I never got a reply. I would gladly redesign the UI for them. I have many years of CAD and programming experience, and have come to the conclusion that they all are outdated and slow. Would they actually be willing to listen? Would people scrap a huge portion of code for efficiency? Probably not...

@@nealgrieb6660 There is no 'dev team' to join. It's an open source project. You just clone the repo, make changes to the code and send a PR. If your contribution is useful, it'll be accepted. I've only rarely seen a PR rejected and only then because it was in conflict with other features or caused other problems. As to the 'snark', everyone who actually contributes to FreeCAD (and there are a lot of us) is a volunteer. I don't mind constructive and useful comments but calling the entire team "probably one of the most incompetent" is just being troll.

@@sliptonic that would explain a lot. The structure of the entire thing seems difficult at best. It's there some list of development goals to follow? How does that list get formed? Seems like a commit free for all will see a lot of useful changes pushed out of the code. Also, makes it seem that I need to get familiar with the entire code before being able to commit a fix for a single issue (unless there was some foresight and the code was created in a modular fashion).

@@nealgrieb6660 It's almost a mistake to think of FreeCAD as ONE CAD application. It's more like a collection of CAD/CAM/CAE tools. The Arch workbench appeals to an entirely different kind of user than Path (CNC/CAM). So contributors tend to work in one part of the application or another. This is also why the UI/UX is so uneven. I'd love to see a more consistent UI but that's difficult to do with such a large complex project. One place to start might be to document specific examples where the same kind of action is done differently in different areas and get some agreement about which one is better/best. Even that is a big effort but wouldn't require any knowledge of the underlying code to get started