alt Hacker NewsI too feel like the latest versions are quite a big improvement and I finally lost that feeling of slowing myself down just for the sake of using OSS.
But I still hope for a "blender moment" where a concerted effort gets rid of old cruft, improves UI/UX and jump-starts growth (also in developers/funding) and further improvements.
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It's probably impossible for FreeCAD to catch up with the industry-standard CAD systems (SOLIDWORKS, NX, Fusion) unless they somehow pour a stupendous amount of money into their geometry kernel [1].
All major CAD systems use mature geometry kernels like Parasolid [2]. Parasolid was developed for 40 years and is still in active development. This is the piece of code that enables CAD systems to do things like computing an intersection of a G3 smooth fillet with embossed text, handling all corner cases.
FreeCAD runs on OpenCASCADE [3], which is both less sophisticated today and is slower to gain new features than Parasolid, being seemingly maintained by one person [4]. FreeCAD's geometry is hard limited by what OpenCASCADE can do.
This is the main difference from Blender. Blender ultimately operates on vertices, which doesn't require nearly the same level of inherent complexity. Blender isn't bottlenecked in what it can do like FreeCAD is.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_modeling_kernel
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology
[4]: https://github.com/Open-Cascade-SAS/OCCT/commits/master/
I kinda wish blender could just do CAD honestly,
It feels like all those 3D modeling apps like 3DSmax,Fusion even Zbrush share like 90% of their feature set but your are forced to literally juggle(for videogame dev at least) because of one or two arguably extremely niche capability.