You heard #Adobe. Deep down you knew this was coming. Now all your art are belong to them. Time to move on to better things…
Kreative Suite
* Krita is your new design/painting app
* Kdenlive will give you video-editing powers
* glaxnimate adds 2D vector animations to you videos
* digiKam organises your collection images
https://kde.org/for/creators/
Also:
* Inkscape - create sophisticated vector-graphic designs
* Scribus - layout like a pro
* GIMP - need we say more
* Blender - ditto
FreeCAD has become soooo good!
@Bro666 @werefreeatlast It’s critically important to manage users expectations with #FOSS - FC is still uniquely set up and challenging to use.
It’s amazing what it can do, but development-wise it feels like #Blender long before it really hit its stride (as well as getting quality tutorials like Blender Guru) several years ago.
I agree! Nevertheless I am still astounded at the progress FreeCAD has made in the last… What? Four ~ five years? It has gone from “barely usable” and “lacking in even basic features” to “woah! You can make that with FreeCAD?”. Also, the community and third party support and contributions have also exploded. This is vital for the survival of a project like this.
@Bro666 @DeltaWye Good to know, good to know. ☺️
Be advised that FreeCAD, much like Blender, is in no way easy to use! It is software for doing engineering and architecture stuff. These thing are not simple. FreeCAD’s learning curve is steep.
The good news is that there are more and more tutorials online (and many are follow-along videos) that can help get you started.
@Bro666 I did some AutoCad at university. Brilliant software if you know how to make stuff happen. Would you say that FreeCad is more difficult? I’m fully aware that this is engineering software. I would hope to be able to afford a 3D Printer one day.
Very hard to say for me. I did use AutoCAD, but it was years ago. I’m talking more than two decades (AutoCAD was first released in the early 80s), so impossible to judge the current state of the software now.
I can say FreeCAD is good for 3D printing stuff. I also like OpenSCAD, a 3D scripting language.
I wrote a 4 part tutorial series that takes you from designing to printing and covered both FreeCAD and OpenSCAD from a beginner’s perspective, if you are interested:
Part 1: OpenSCAD
Part 2: More OpenSCAD
Part 3: FreeCAD
Part 4: Slicing and printing
@Bro666 @DeltaWye Same with Kdenlive. 4-5 years ago, it lacked to many features and was a bit too buggy for me. These days, it’s hugely updated, pretty darn stable and frankly… awesome.
@Bro666 @DeltaWye
FreeCAD can cope with low end, sketch-and-pad work. New users seem quite happy. It really needs a usability upgrade to help on-boarding though. More visual interaction feedback would help a lot. A verb-noun UI too. Start a command, which then guides what selections are needed.
For high end and surfacing work it’s a non starter.
We need more people with programming, CAD and usability skills. A rare combination, it seems.
@Bro666 @werefreeatlast Has it? I was using it not even 1 year ago and I concluded I’d rather use Blender.
The face naming problem aside, I left feeling very frustrated about a lot of things. Like how hard it was to reuse sketches on parts that would mesh because you’d end up with the dependency loop checker refusing to solve for constraints across parts that shared a sketch.
It is not perfect, of course! It also does not have the resources of Blender. Then again, both pieces of software are quite different and have different uses.
@Bro666 I don’t mean to dunk on any CAD software. I just felt like it’s a bit early to start sending folks over there
I do think it’s very healthy that ondsel exists now and is helping to inflate the project.