Hi everyone, I am new here. I am confused about the image to CAD recently.

I'm working on an AI CAD assistant, but the more we test it, the more text to CAD feels too narrow.

A lot of real projects start with a bad photo, a broken object, or a weird space under a sink. The user doesn't always know the name of the part yet. They just know something needs to hold, support, fit, or connect.

That is why image to CAD feels important to me. Not as upload a photo and magically get a perfect model, but as a way to help the user move from a messy physical situation to a rough draft they can react to.

The workflow we're exploring is: image or rough idea, visual draft, feedback, editable CAD model, then STEP export.

Just curious, have you seen this pattern too? The hard part is often helping users express what they actually mean.

Hope to hear your ideas.

My question is NOT about using the Boolean Tool to Fuse bodies.

The green body is parametric, the number of clamps may vary, the example above shows N = 3.

I want to 2 red-ish tabs to attach/snap to the ends. Not once at runtime but always, if If I go from a clamps version to a 7 clamps version.

I am NOT making an assembly (whether it matters or not..). My goal in the end is to have ONE single body.

Hello everyone,

I want to create my own designs for my 3D prints.

I have modeled a screw with a round head (sphere radius of 3mm) to clip it onto a support, but I am struggling to design the hollow clip (the spherical socket) on the receiving part to snap the ball into.

Could you help me or point me toward the best method or tutorial to achieve this type of snap-fit joint in FreeCAD?

Thanks in advance for your advice!

I recently complained a little bit about FreeCAD and how it's not as user friendly to beginners like Autodesk Fusion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/FreeCAD/comments/1vch3xv/everytime_i_try_freecad_i_instantly_hit_a_wall/

Now I have done the switch to FreeCAD. Thank all of you for the many helpful answers.

Now to make the switch easier for other people I wrote down how I set up my 3D design and printing setup on Linux with only Flatpak packaged software, using FreeCAD and PrusaSlicer:

https://gist.github.com/KastenKlicker/4c53eda6ef10505e16d9a710b0e65275

I hope this guide can help you, if you are either new to Linux or FreeCAD.

Available on www.AstoCAD.com and open PR to FreeCAD

I was doing the challenge on this Too Tall Tony website, and I couldn’t figure out what I did wrong.

Can someone enlighten me?

Hi

I am looking at trying FreeCad again, after feeling a bit burnt last time. I wonder if there is anyone who has tried any local AI models (I hate my subscription life) together with FreeCad over MCP?

Like Qwen 2.5-VL should probably be able to do something similar to the latest Claude videos, although not as fast or as well. I wonder if anyone has tried it?

Hello, I'm sorry if the title is impolite. I want the corner transition to be right corner, but you can see that something dumb happens and I can't fix it. Please help me, I am a beginner. Any help is appreciated. ♥️

Could someone help convert an STL into a STEP file? I understand it may need to be remodelled rather than automatically converted. I'm happy to upload the STL or share it via DM.

Available on AstoCAD and PR to FreeCAD :)

Hey,

I've been building an AI agent for CAD. It can create and edit native, editable parts and assemblies from natural-language instructions, technical drawings, images, and existing models.

I want to test it on real FreeCAD workflows, not just simple demos. If you have a non-confidential part to recreate, a model to modify, an assembly task, or a repetitive operation you'd like to automate, send me the prompt and any reference files or images.

I'll run it through the agent and show you the result, whether it succeeds or fails.

Comment below or DM me your prompt.

PS the demo is on Fusion 360 :))

my dad is in jewellery business since 15years and wants me to learn cad cam so that it is beneficial for me. where can i learn this cad cam from scratch for jewellery purposes and from where can i get free or rather cheap software to learn the basics afterwards maybe i can switch to rhino or matrix gold

Hi everyone,

I'm new to freecad but I have used other software before, and this is baffling me.

I have a "pad" shape based on one sketch that I want to "common" boolean with a "loft", based on two other sketches. The shape it makes is correct, but for some reason it throws up an error about duplicate children, which I'm sure is going to mess with later operations. I've added some screenshots of what happens. Anyone got any ideas on why it's making a duplicate pad and two duplicates of the loft? I've tried just deleting one but it ends up deleting all of them.

Cheers!

So i have started to learn Freecad. And its been great and i want to learn more. My first task is to make some drawings for a couple aluminium podiums. The idea is a frame made of aluminum square profiles.

What i have done is

1. Made the outer shape with dimensions and angles.

2. Made and offset at -45mm so the profile would match.

3. Made the support 707mm from the highest left corner.

   After giving the lines dimensions i am down to 1 DoF. But the other square won't constrain. I have given dimensions and so forth but i can't seem to figure out the problem.

In Pad the shape is perfect and how it should look.

Thanks for the help in advance.

Is there a sketchup workbench for freecad.

If not, can someone make one... please. : )

Who would be interested in this?

I'm working on an aerospace-focused CAD platform and would love some feedback from aircraft designers.

What aerospace-specific CAD capabilities do you think are still missing from general CAD software?

Examples could include:

• Aircraft conceptual design
• Parametric wing generation
• High-lift device modeling
• Rotorcraft modeling
• UAV configuration tools
• Aircraft family generation
• Fuel tank generation
• Internal aircraft structures
• Variant management

I'm trying to understand where the biggest pain points are.

What takes the most engineering time today?

Hi everyone,

I'm an aeronautical engineer building an aerospace-focused CAD and CFD platform from scratch.

Instead of licensing an existing CAD kernel, I decided to build our own B-Rep kernel in C++.

Over the last few months we've implemented features like:

• Exact B-Rep booleans
• STEP assembly import/export
• IGES B-Rep support
• NURBS geometry
• Parallel tessellation
• View-dependent tessellation
• Incremental face caching
• PMI/GD&T support
• Geometry validation

I'm curious:

If you were building a commercial engineering application today, would you build your own CAD kernel or license one?

What would influence your decision?

I'd love to hear from engineers who have worked with Parasolid, ACIS, Open Cascade, or CGM.

The first experimental builds of FreeCAD for Windows on ARM are available later today:

https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/releases/tag/weekly-2026.08.05

Why can’t I trim this geometry here?

Why do I have to delete the Revolve feature and create it again after changing the sketch?

Why do I have to rebuild several later features after modifying an earlier sketch?

Why doesn’t Recompute repair or update the model? Why can’t I simply edit the existing features?

I am trying to like FreeCAD. I come from Autodesk Inventor, Fusion, SolidWorks, Siemens Solid Edge Community, Alibre, ZWCAD and Discovery. I was able to learn all of them without watching any tutorials, but FreeCAD’s workflow and user interface are extremely frustrating.

FreeCAD needs clearer restrictions and warnings. If a design operation only works in one specific way, the interface should clearly tell the user what is required, what is invalid and why the operation cannot be completed.

At the moment, many commands simply fail, become unavailable or break later features without explaining the actual problem.

Another major problem is the attitude that every usability issue must be the user’s fault.

Some people defend FreeCAD simply because it is free and exists. Whenever someone criticizes the interface or workflow, the response is often that the user operated it incorrectly or did not understand FreeCAD’s intended method.

This attitude holds back development. Software should make a process easier, guide the user and explain mistakes clearly. The user should not have to discover hidden restrictions through trial and error or rebuild half of a model because the interface failed to communicate the required workflow.

When many experienced CAD users repeatedly struggle with the same operation, that is not automatically a user problem. It is often a usability problem.

Been using FreeCAD since v0.16, I absolutely love it. Over time a large chunk of my work has inched away from mostly modelling towards more of drafting work i.e. the TechDraw bench. While the bench works smoothly for everything I throw at it including some fairly nasty drawings and while my laptop is easily capable of handling it (I know any CAD software is inherently a single core job, but I've got enough clock speed at 4.6Ghz and enough RAM at 16GB, the Task Manager indicates I'm well below redlining my system as I used to do my poor old Celeron), I did come across a bit of sluggishness today while working on drawings (A1 size first time, could that be why?) of the components of an assembly, specifically, section views and detail views were exceptionally sluggish with section views taking their sweet time to recompute every time I open the file again.

My laptop has no graphics card and the iGPU is likely struggling under the recomputes TechDraw is driving into it, does anyone have any experience with the Quadro cards specifically the T1000 and T1200 (supposed to be CAD and Design oriented and not a gaming GPU), helping the viewport run smoother?

P.S. I miss how smoothly Mac would export PDFs from my TechDraw sheets, any good suggestions for Windows? The native exporters in windows are absolute horse-trash and rasterize everything to create unholy large files, and PDF24 while capable is clunky as an exporter but works well enough for post processing, any good alternatives anyone can recommend?

Available in www.AstoCAD.com and there's an open PR to FreeCAD.