I just spent my entire weekend doing my Sketchup 8 keybinds. I just had to share.
I just spent my entire weekend doing my Sketchup 8 keybinds. I just had to share.
And I'm curious if I could map my keys to make Freecad work this way. I don't know how many of the these tools don't exist in Freecad, but if I could one to one make a keybind that works for me, I might start using it instead of sketchup 8
But mostly, this is the because general CAD community on lemmy and I wanted to share, ciao!
Sketchup is a "direct" modeling software, while FreeCAD is a "parametric" or "history based", so most of the things work totally differently. Here is a nice article comparing these different approaches in modeling software: https://www.bluentcad.com/blog/parametric-vs-direct-modeling/
So the biggest problem won't be to find similarly named commands in FreeCAD but to learn about this completely different way to model things.
I would imagine most of these would have an analog in some way. They are really the most basic commands, like translation, rotation, draw a line,rectangle or circle, apply material/texture, view angle front etc..
Yes and no. The part workbench, which is mostly (but not entirely) deprecated in favor of the Part Design workbench has some of these, and I think there may be a couple of nods in the direction of synchronous/direct modeling, such that a few of the commands could exist, but the standard workflow for parametric history modelers just works differently enough that things don't really translate.
For instance, "draw a rectangle" exists, but it exists in the 2D Sketcher mode/workbench that is then padded ("extrude" is the more common term) or rotated into 3D space. It's quite rare to just plop down primitives and merge them, though if you fight the prgram quite a bit, you can make it do some of that. Groups work so differently as to not really be the same tool.
Now, I do think direct modeling gets a bad rap sometimes, especially in communities where most people are not professionally drafting multi-part assemblies, but are instead making single standalone parts/prototypes, which is exactly what direct modeling was invented to do well. They are slightly different paradigms though, and FreeCAD is WAAAAY over into the realm of "Sketch, Extrude, New Sketch, New Extrude, Third Sketch, Insert Pocket, etc. etc." This enables the parametric history that lets you go back and, for instance, modify every screw hole at once, or to change every chamfer on face X to be a fraction of the original height. It looks Sketchup can do some of that, but it's not the main design paradigm.
The end result is that while, yeah, you could probably find something more or less analogous to most of the hotkeys you've programmed for Sketchup, there is a very good chance that you simply won't use them nearly as much, or together in that same way.
While I'm piling on, Sketchup is also natively mesh based, meaning there's a "resolution" limit to your parts that won't exist in FreeCAD or other NURBS modelers (some of which are also direct modeling). Among NURBS direct modelers, Rhino3D is a great choice if you're still a student, and BricsCAD shape is a pretty decent free-as-in-beer one, especially if you use Linux; it even has a little human paper doll to help you establish scale. DesignSpark Mechanical is another good direct modeler, but it's windows only and unless you want to pay for a (fairly cheap) subscription, it has painfully limited import and export options.