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Advice on a CAD solution (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I'm in need of a CAD program with an easy aproach for someone with zero experience on this type of software.

3D printing is not a concern

I intend to draw the blueprints for my house. The building is old, no blueprints exist for it, and I intend to make renovations to it, so having blueprints to work on to plan the renovations will be a huge help.

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[–] 5 points 1 year ago (7 children)

If you want to do accurate calculations, wall thickness, exact angles, window sizes etc., I would recommend FreeCAD, especially the draft workbench and possibly the BIM workbench if you want to go 3D afterwards.

Tutorial FreeCAD draft workbench (2D): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODEeqtepOwA

Tutorial FreeCAD BIM workbench (3D) as a follow-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZHyUBfdgJA

If you are more looking for a rough planning where you can test furniture placements, floor designs and see fast results, I recommend The Sims 4 (no joke!). The base game is free (also available on Steam) and it's quite easy and intuitive to move stuff around, change a wall, place decorations etc.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Unusual solution but I can see it working! Most definetely.

    But I do require some degree of accuracy on what I intend to do, so FreeCAD is lining up be the best solution, taking from the answer I'm getting.

    The house is old and drawing an as much as humanly possible accurate blueprint would be a plus. And I do have some very weird angles in it.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I currently switch a lot between FreeCAD and Sims. When I brainstorm with my girlfriend we either use a simple drawing programm or Sims. Then, once we aligned on an idea, I use FreeCAD to bring in accuracy. Quite often then the original ideas don't work out because of wall thickness, window placement etc.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    What are you running FreeCAD on? I have tried it on 4-5 different systems and it has ran like shit on all of them. Like I don't expect it to be perfect but it took 30-90 seconds to even respond when I try to do something. That's completely unusable. I finished an entire (fairly simple) design I was working on in Fusion360 before I could even get 2 rectangles sketched out in FreeCad. I'd love to get it working because it's one of my bigger hangups getting rid of windows.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    I never had these kind of performance issues at all. I use it on three different ThinkPads, all not too bad but also no crazy hardware. The cheapest should be an E14 with a AMD 5500U and 16 GB of RAM that was around 500€ 4 years ago.

    Isn't Fusion360 cloud-based? If so, it doesn't make too much sense to compare the performance on a certain hardware.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    My understanding is fusion360 only does some things in the cloud. It still runs locally. Otherwise they could have a web app I could use on my Linux desktop and not worry about it. I was using them side by side on two separate workstations (the one with FreeCAD actually has higher specs) and I wasn't really trying to compare performance but when it's that glaring of a difference it can't just come down to hardware and like I said it wasn't just "slower" it was completely unusuable. I tried FreeCAD on the system I use Fusion360 on as well with similar results to everything else I've tried it on.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Okay, that's strange. When you say workstations, I assume that you had pretty decent hardware and probably more powerful than my consumer notebook. I usually don't notice lags or load times > 1 second. If I do a complex operation like mass-cloning an object via a polar pattern, I have to wait for 2 or 3 seconds but really nothing that bothered me in the workflow. Definitely never anything close to a minute as you described.

    If you want to give FreeCAD another chance one day and still experience the same issues, maybe bring it up in the official forums. The experts there might have an idea what could be wrong.

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