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.
pirate solidworks. fuck dassault systemes, but they make a damned good cad program, with excellent documentation on how to do just about everything under the sun (and some stuff that even the sun don’t shine on)
use a win10 ltsc VM with device passthru for running it, it won’t know the difference.
I respect the spirit but no. You made me smile, nonetheless. But why resort to windows plus a pirated software?
It may very well be a very good solution, perhaps even the best, but it’s not what I want to support, even if indirectly.
you don’t need windows, but that is how I have my install set up, as WINE can be kind of buggy with the program. it doesn’t need networking, so no risk of m$ taking info, and SW2024 can run on 8GB and some CPU passthrough.
speaking as someone who’s tried just about ever 3dCAD program under the sun, SW is the best on the market for ease of use, documentation, and available plugins.
openSCAD is absolute hell for ease-of-use, onshape sells your data, freecad has the same issues as openscad, and AutoCAD, while good, still is worse than SW due to poorer documentation, and more annoying interface.
of course, there is always the option of doing the drawings by hand on paper, with a ruler, a compass, and a protractor. this may be your best option for sharability, as your local municipality may want to have it for their records as well, assuming that a) they don’t already have it, and b) if they do, you were unable to procure the original blueprints.
They don’t. :) First place I asked. The house is so old it still falls under a exemption to have blueprints deposited at the municipality. In fact, it wasn’t even built with blueprints.
damn, that thing must be like, a Scottish castle or something LOL.
super cool that you live there!
now I’m confused about onshape though, as anything digital that’s “free” has long since enshittefied, and sold you as the product… could the seriously be one of the last bastions of good free software? it may not be OSS, but if its really that good… hmmm, food for thought. I’ll have to do more research on it.
1947
So, old but not that old.
SolidWorks isn’t the right tool for 2D. And if it was, Onshape has a free tier.
its the right tool for everything engineering related; you can do drafting very easily, its built-in.
onshape may have a free tier, but piracy is better than free, due to “free” meaning that your information is the product being sold (to other vendors).
I’ve used SolidWorks for over 20 years, it is NOT the right tool for 2D layouts. That’s what Draftsight was for, before they killed it.
You pirate away, good luck with trojans and viruses. I’ll use Onshape.
I’ve been pirating for a looooooong time. I’ve never once gotten viruses. stick to private trackers, and proven uploaders for software (fitgirlrepacks, solidsquad, etc) and you won’t get viruses.
If you only need 2D, there is LibreCAD.
Sketchup 2022 works flawlessly. Arch
Toyed a bit with Sketchup before Google got their claws on it. Abandoned it after it happened.
I think it became a browser based solution at some point?
Pro is still the same desktop app
Not in the mood to pay for a solution that a FOSS program may cover as well, considering it won’t be used for professional purposes.
Bricskcad (paid native solution for Linux easy find on torrent) kompas 3d v21 russian development with russian interface works under wine easy to pirate too,freecad,librecad
FreeCAD is great for 3D CAD models but not that great for CAD drawings
for 2d your best bet would be qcad (free) and draftsight (paid). some distros have qcad in their repositories.
a little more sophisticated would be freecad with its bim workbench and blender with the bonsaibim addon. both of them let you draw in 3d and print floor plans off of those model.
for a quick mockup you can try sweethome3d.
I never tried it, because it is 2d only: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.dubstar_04.design
Wow, this looks nice!
A native GNOME solution. Wasn’t expecting that one.
Qcad is a good one for drawing blueprints
It’s not perfect, but for that stuff, I’d use SweetHome3D.
Don’t know about its current state but this helped me a lot with moving out to a new place, years ago. The version how I remember wouldn’t be so helpful with renovations I think. Still can be used as placeholder though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think the creators of the Sims designed the game with that in mind but if works, it is not stupid.
I did something similar recently, old house, wanted floor plans for renovation / idea generation.
Initially I started with FreeCAD and used the BIM functionaly, worked well, but a few bugs at time.
I’ve done a few smaller scale models of some rooms recently in [Bonsai](https://bonsaibim.org/(formerly BlenderBIM), and found the process a little more pleasent. This could be due to my previous blender experience and the hotkeys being more on my bones.
I respect Blender very much but I’m also aware it requires a very deep dive to manage to use at minimum. So, as much as I can, I’ll avoid it.
I think you’d be surprised, the on ramp I would say is easier than FreeCAD.
requires a very deep dive
On the contrary, in my opinion it was very intuitive. AI is also more helpful than with freecad when I ask it “how to do _ in blender/freecad?”
Onshape has a free tier, though all the cad files you make in it are publically available. That being said, it’s easy to use and, since it’s browser based, completely comparable with linux
For all the obvious reasons, I’d like to keep my house blueprints off the public domain.
For what you are doing SketchUp might be the best tool. Its easy to work with and good with architectural stuff.
SketchUp was intended for this purpose and is so incredibly easy to get started with.
Unless something has changed, it definitely is for sketching only, as it lacks a lot of advanced functionality found in other CAD programs.
I think everyone’s got the CAD/3D programs covered, so a slightly “out there” answer:
If you’re just doing 2D blueprints for yourself, do you actually just need a 2D vector program for doing a scale drawing with measurements?
I’ve done a lot of floorplans / layouts/ site maps etc using Inkscape, for instance.
It depends on exactly what you’re wanting out the other end - so you may be lacking a lot of the features in a full CAD program, but the learning curve is comparatively so shallow that you might have a working plan by the end of the day, rather than the end of the month.
That could be an option. I need/want to put blueprints on digital format to facilitate editing in order to plan renovations. I could do all the work by hand on paper but it would be an hassle every time a change or idea needed to be tried out on the floor plan.
FreeCAD is the most common solid FOSS modeler. I do not think any solid modeling system is that simple. They tend to need training and continuous use. That was my experience with SolidWorks and NX anyway.
Learning and using it don’t are barriers.
I could draw the blueprints by hand, on paper, but doing it in a digital format will make it easier to edit, review, etc.
I’ll check FreeCAD.
If you want 2D drafting like solution, look at Librecad. It seems quite good. It is 2D only.
Freecad is 3D solid modeling but there is a 2D component.
FreeCAD is pretty capable but it’s openly 3D focused and doesn’t make for a great 2D only solution. However, for some simple work with remodeling, it might be fine.
The draft workbench and sketcher workbench in FreeCAD are both only for 2D projects.
Sketcher is used as the first step for an extrusion iirc but draft is what he wants. It is just more built for 3D models to be turned into drafts rather than making a draft from scratch.
I currently combine Draft, Bim and Sketcher to plan my house. You can also use Tech Draw and Part Design in some areas. I think FreeCAD has a steep learning curve with all the features it has, but it’s also incredibly powerful.
