Man, I thought FreeCAD’s problem was me being an idiot, but glad to hear someone else come to the same conclusion. I recently spent an hour or two almost every evening for about 3 weeks to come up with what I thought was a simple object I needed to print. The cycle was:
1) Watch and do one tutorial that gets you 80% of the way there.
2) Try to stumble together the rest of the way.
3) Find out the fundamental tutorial doesn’t set up my project in a way that allows me to finish the 20%.
4) Watch the whole project fall apart as I try to modify one of the previous steps.
5) Repeat.
Does the order typical matter that much in CAD? I went all in on this thinking it was a simple object and how hard can FreeCAD be. Turns out, very hard.
There are many, many bad small tutorials on youtube where the presenter has something that works for them but fails to understand the core principles. Or it's from way back before the 0.18 redesign of Part Design.
The Mango Jelly Solutions videos, the Joko engineering videos, the Adventures In Creation videos and thehardwareguy's videos are excellent.
There is no doubt that understanding how to mitigate TNP is important, though. Many of the videos do not go into this each time (which will be good once the issue is mitigated, very soon, but is obviously an issue at the moment).
The fundamental issue I see with bad Youtube tutorials is people skipping from Part Design to other workbenches without understanding that they are not wholly interchangeable. That is, all Part Design Body objects are Parts, but not all Parts are Part Design Body objects. Part Design is a subset.
There is at least one excellent video by Mango Jelly Solutions going into the detail of why you should choose one over the other.
But the guts of it is that Part Design does have an ordered flow -- it's a sequence of steps from a simple to a complete object, executed one after the other and implicitly booleaned together. So it has additive features and subtractive features.
Whereas in a non-Part-Design workflow, you are in charge of when something is cut from something else; there's no subtractive tooling, only boolean tools. More CSG-ish.
A good grasp of FreeCAD involves understanding Part Design's relatively special guided flow, and that outside of it is a more open-ended approach.
The RealThunder developments to Part Design after TNP was fixed do go a long way towards making this less relevant (Part Design can work with multiple bodies rather than being focussed on a single body, and you can "wrap" non-Part-Design objects in a Part Design Body object more freely without using a macro). And that way you get to use Part Design much more like Fusion 360.
But there are definitely FreeCAD proponents who would say that Part Design is training wheels for what is really going on, and that there's no substitute for many general concepts inside Part Design. The latter is true; also the implicit booleans in Part Design make some of the PD operations slower.
> Does the order typical matter that much in CAD? I went all in on this thinking it was a simple object and how hard can FreeCAD be. Turns out, very hard.
Yes, it does matter. I discovered this through my own self learning with OpenSCAD, FreeCAD and OnShape. I actually prefer the workflow of FreeCAD to OnShape for a lot of tasks.
FreeCAD isn't that hard, cad isn't that hard. Especially for any developer with some level of XP in breaking down a complex problem domain into smaller composable parts.
1) Watch and do one tutorial that gets you 80% of the way there.
2) Try to stumble together the rest of the way.
3) Find out the fundamental tutorial doesn’t set up my project in a way that allows me to finish the 20%.
4) Watch the whole project fall apart as I try to modify one of the previous steps.
5) Repeat.
Does the order typical matter that much in CAD? I went all in on this thinking it was a simple object and how hard can FreeCAD be. Turns out, very hard.