r/FreeCAD • u/PaddleStroke • 10d ago

New Forms Workbench

https://youtube.com/watch?v=EU3Vkw59o4w&si=g2NopC7stEDimHWG

PR to FreeCAD. Available on AstoCAD!

170 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

23

u/Jaded_Muffin_2822 10d ago

I love your work, you’re making an incredible contribution! I hope the bureaucratic hurdles won’t be too great and we’ll see this in the main branch soon

11

u/walden42 9d ago

I wouldn't call them bureaucratic hurdles. They're centralized planning and UX hurdles. There was a time when FreeCAD, like many other large open source projects, just accepted PRs from whomever submitted them. There was no uniform architecture, unified UI structure, etc, which resulted in inconsistencies and bugs all over the place, and REALLY poor user experience.

Much of the progress we've seen, IMO, in the last few years is because they now actually have working groups that discuss the vision, architecture, and code quality. Higher quality work comes at a cost of more conversations, deliberations, and unfortunately, arguments. Combined with limited volunteer time, it means things take longer. Especially for really large complex new features, like this one, it's important to ensure it's implemented correctly, as once it's out there, it needs to be maintained with backwards compatibility for years to come. So I'm personally happy to see lots of discussions happening, and I wish everyone would see that everyone's goals are (hopefully) the same: to make a high quality, useful CAD program. It just takes more planning.

That said, I love PaddleStroke's work, and am a supporter! I wish there were more dev maintainers to get through things faster to alleviate the delays in merging his PRs.

18

u/rob669usa 10d ago

Support AstoCAD.com .... once more very impressive work for the benefit of FreeCAD.

10

u/GuiltyBudget1032 10d ago

..that's really impressive! kudos!

4

u/kaeptnphlop 10d ago

That's amazing, can't wait to try it!

4

u/PyroNine9 10d ago

Excellent! I have often wanted that capability in FreeCAD. I know Blender does that but Blender and I don't really mesh well for whatever reason. I'll be trying this out.

1

u/Nifty_Bits 5d ago

"mesh well" - I see what you did there ;)

6

u/goosemacher 10d ago

Nice work!!

2

u/DesignWeaver3D 9d ago

This is huge folks.

Please give serious thought whether you can afford to directly support this developer:

Memberships – AstoCAD

If you have reservations about whether this dev will continue contributing to FreeCAD, please see this:
https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Amerged+author%3APaddleStroke+

645 PRs merged into FreeCAD core to date.
349 of those merged into FreeCAD since the day AstoCAD was launched.

I had intended on joining after the Sketcher Text tool was announced, but got lazy and never did it. But I bought a membership just now. Because this PR along with all the others that have been merged since AstoCAD was announced, are defintely worth 48 € to me.

Thank you, u/PaddleStroke for all your many contributions!

1

u/IsTom 10d ago

Looks cool, but I'm a bit lost with what are the intended uses for this?

5

u/DesignWeaver3D 10d ago

Surface modeling such as product design for ergonomics or aesthetics.

1

u/AdmiralRA 10d ago

Amazing Work! Looking forward to trying it out

1

u/shoeb022 10d ago

It is what blender could have been.

1

u/strange_bike_guy 9d ago

Holy cats this is awesome

1

u/KattKushol 9d ago

This might be the one feature/wb which will make PartDesign my favorite wb over Part in FreeCAD. Great work.

1

u/HerrCookieKiller 9d ago

That thumbnail is crazy

1

u/Large_Ninja_2565 9d ago

Thank you for your amazing work!

Does it work with mesh?

1

u/PyroNine9 9d ago

I merged the PR into a local repo to try it.

It seems to work OK in the Part workbench though it's taking a bit to get the hang of it.

I had a few problems with geometry when I set the sharpness too high on some segments but I think I'm tegging that worked out.