When you select the circle tool, you will see in the lower right corner a box that is asking for the center of the circle. but then what if you need a 1.62mm radius? Yes, you can zoom in even more, but at some point this becomes very tedious, and might be hard to be sure you're getting 1.62 instead of 1.52.įor ultimate precision, use the command line interface instead of the point and click described above. You can zoom in until the snapping grid becomes. E.g., if the snapping points are on a 1mm grid, it is going to be hard to create a circle with a 1.6mm radius. If you have snapping enabled, this can be quite precise, but only if the snapping points match the desired dimensions. The most precise way to do this is through the "command line interface."įor example, to create a circle in LibreCAD, you CAN click on the tool, click on a point to serve as the center, and stretch it out to some radius. ![]() I'm using mm for my units below, but you can just as well use inches.Īnswer 1: You dimension elements of the drawing as you put them in place. There are two ways to respond to this question - not sure which of these is the one you are primarily thinking about, so feel free to ask for more focus. ?) I've never had any trouble putting dimensions on anything I want, but then again, I am no engineer, so I may be doing it wrong (very likely!) or not understanding some aspect of dimensioning (also very likely!) or so on. Do other CAD programs allow for that? (I'm picturing some sort of fuzzy boundaries on every object in the model. Can you unpack that a bit? You mention tolerances - you can certainly include tolerances in the drawings that you can produce from the 3D models, but I'm not sure how it would work to actually build the model with tolerances. Joe, I am not sure what you mean by not being able to dimension anything. but now I suspect I'd have a hard time going back to TurboCAD. That said, my first CAD experience was with TurboCAD "way back when," and LibreCAD has a very different process, so it took a bit of time to get comfortable with it. I haven't used it as much lately (see below), but for some projects I find it easier to work in 2D (or maybe just to work out some particular issue of 2D geometry), and LibreCAD does everything I need. Yes, I have used LibreCAD fairly extensively. "that's a cool way to do it - wish FreeCAD had that." ![]() However, I will say that when I have watched an occasional YouTube video that includes a Fusion360 segment, I have about equal instances where I think, "that seems like a clunky way to do it it's a lot easier in FreeCAD", vs. I can't speak to that, as I have never tried to learn any other 3D CAD software. I have heard people say that there is a higher learning curve with FreeCAD. With regard to the inconsistent UI: There is an effort to correct that, but it is a tradeoff that is not uncommon in open software - will the volunteer developers put time and energy into creating that new feature that will be really useful, or into going back and tweaking the existing UI? Again, some effort is going into the latter, but probably the overall balance is skewed to the former. Note that sliptonic has an inexpensive book on how to use FreeCAD it is based on an earlier version, but most of what he teaches is still relevant. Other YouTubers that I find particularly helpful with FreeCAD are Joko Engineering and sliptonic, but they tend to talk about advanced features or edge cases. Caveat: I have only watched a bit of these I would not say that the creator is the best "tutorialist" out there, but they are usable / useful. I'm pretty sure I've seen more than one beginner series based on v.19, but the only one I can name is by "Adventures in Creation," he is up to tutorial # 15 in the series. The second thing I would say is that it is probably helpful to work through a beginner series of videos first otherwise you are watching various edge cases or advanced techniques or so on, and can easily get lost because they are assuming you know the basics. 19, so look for tutorials that refer to that version. With regard to tutorials (at least on YouTube), I would say that they have gotten better at including the version in the title - the latest version of FreeCAD is. The bad news is, it can be hard to sort out the up-to-date and most helpful tutorials, and the UI can be inconsistent. Joe's comment above points to both the good news and the bad news - the good news is, there are a LOT of tutorials out there on FreeCAD the good news is that the program is very flexible and it continues to develop rapidly. ![]() I find myself doing most of my work in FreeCAD these days.
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