Comment by bartvk
I love free software. However I'm still kinda doubting... should I want to take a commercial job, aren't we expected to use Solidworks or something?
But yeah, thinking in CAD is probably the major step here.
I love free software. However I'm still kinda doubting... should I want to take a commercial job, aren't we expected to use Solidworks or something?
But yeah, thinking in CAD is probably the major step here.
I am no expert but my take on this is:
FreeCAD is obviously not a commercial grade CAD package, but it’s not because it is weak conceptually: it’s not dissimilar to Solidworks, Onshape or Fusion. It’s weak in terms of UI flow and its CAD kernel is flawed in some ways (as you probably already know: fillets, chamfers, drafts, thicknesses/shells).
I don’t believe there is so much to learn to get from FreeCAD to one of those packages, at least where core concepts are concerned, so I carry on with what I am doing.
But on the other hand I think one learns a concept best from multiple perspectives, and all of them, essentially, have a free, student or cheap (e.g. Solidworks For Makers) tier, so probably the answer for us is to do some learning in one or two of those alongside.
There is a good video on YouTube by Deltahedra where he does a Solidworks certification exam using FreeCAD, incidentally.