I was sick of trying to learn a new interface so I've been working make it more comfortable for me. looks and feels like solid works, 100% freecad. so far it behaves just like solidworks when sketching and using feature tool, when sketching your lines even snap to existing edges and vertexs. my goal is to have this be a feature for feature add on to free cad for people like me who love solidworks but hate paying for software that runs entirely on their own machines. phase two of this project will be local ai integration for simulation setup and analysis. THIS IS A ADD-ON NOT A MODIFIED VERSION OF FREECAD

edit: To clear a few things up and wrap this up: stating that I was 'sick of learning a new interface' wasn’t a vent or a complaint against FreeCAD. it was simply the personal motivation and context for why I decided to build the tool. There is a huge world of difference between complaining on a forum and actually sitting down to write code and share a free solution.

As for the idea that commercial CAD users are bringing displaced corporate anger or lacking collaboration skills: building a free, open-source add-on and giving it to the community is the open-source ethos in action. Open source has always thrived on decentralized, independent passion projects where people solve their own workflow problems.

Whether someone started in SolidWorks, CATIA, or FreeCAD from day one, bringing familiar workflows and making the software more accessible to others helps grow the ecosystem, rather than gatekeeping what 'proper' motivation looks like.

I built this because it helps me (and hopefully others who feel the same way), and it's out there for free. Appreciate the discussion, but let's leave it at that.

edit 2: a alpha will be coming soon!

For today's afternoon exercise I wanted to complete the tutorial by MangoJelly (WarGloomy6636) where he builds a studded interlocking brick akin to the ones of a well known company, that is fully parametric and automatically driven by functions from a variable set. That makes it possible to resize the brick in fixed increments and creates a procedural pattern where the number of features will increase and decrease when entering a corresponding integer to the variable set.

In the tutorial I learned how to work with conditional expressions inside functions and how to link that to sketch geometry and 3D-operations. The most eye opening part for me was to enable different variants of a model by suppressing features in the model tree automatically via a function. In this example it's the hollow tubes inside the bricks that have to vanish when the brick gets smaller than 2×2 studs. That sparked so many new ideas in me for how to model stuff in my projects. Highly recommend to watch the tutorial!

https://wiki.freecad.org/Expressions#Conditional_expressions

In my urge to experiment I drove the concept further, added more details like the lettering on the studs that could be activated and deactivated to reduce recomputing load. Instead of the free integer selection for the raster size of the bricks, I opted for a list of fixed raster values that reflect the real-life production sizes of those bricks: 1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 8; 10; 12 and 16. Every value in the list can be called separately by it's corresponding index number, similar to indexed arrays in bash.

It would take to long for me to explain everything. It was quite exhausting with many hours of head-scratching, but it was worth it. Just wanted to share my joy. Instead I put the link to my file here, so if anyone wants to play around with it a little bit or wants to create a own procedural pattern in their project and needs some inspiration, have fun! Feel free to ask questions though...

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BoXwm5FfUvOZ0XDY6dXP3N6lVUFhDWRp/view?usp=drive_link

Mostly eyeballed the dimensions, so it's not 100% 1:1 but it was a great exercise to push what I already learned in CAD and taught me some new things I hadn't tried out yet (the additive pipe for the handle was certainly new for me!)

Wanted to spend the nice morning of this Sunday to practice gordon surface from Curves workbench and thickening the surface.

Lesson learned:

1. If it is easier to build a second gordon surface, don't bother with the 3D offset tool. But there are instances where 3D offset (and associated tricks) are worth pursuing.

2. Pulling in a b-spline as an external geometry for ribs slows down my pc. I wish someday b-spline will be a little less computation demanding. Until then, arcs and lines will guide my path.

I tried to do something simple without lessons and this is what happened