As There may be doubts as for what an Assembly Workbench may be, is the equivalent of the animation workbench, except instead of animating, it allow us to put all the pieces we made together and see if they fit and interact correctly. It usually has some sort of toggleable physics and limited interactivity.
FreeCAD’s Assembly is too young to have amazing examples, but wintergattan made a demonstration of Fussion 360 assembly brought to its knees with his amazing marble machine:
Thanks for the information. It looks like FreeCAD is great for intricate designs, probably more than I need. Being able to run a script is really useful. I used something like that at work years ago, a program called Gambit. It came with a fluid dynamics simulator called FIDAP, and was quite like what you describe. It did require meshing the interior of objects for where the fluid would flow. I found it useful to download the script, tweak it, then run it again. That said, it was pretty primitive. And frustrating at times.
They don’t need to be intrincate, but what FreeCAD does good is precise. The fact you can go back and forth and change measurements at any point makes it really good at iterating designs for real life manufacture.
On the other hand, FreeCAD sucks at doing organic designs, or anything that has to be exported for low-poly usage, or doing animations. Cannot do texturing well, forget about rendering things… So basically, if it needs to stay within the confines of a computer, FreeCAD is not your tool.
Well… I’m sad for whoever bought the product but seems is more like Wil stopped keeping up with Amazon API, and because it was a closed-sourced, propietary, commercial software, and never open-sourced it, after 3 years of not releasing real updates, the API is now desynced.
So… Is this enshitification or just “you buy commercial software that is at the end of its life and not supported, you get what you buy?”
Open Source alernative that seems to be still working, albeit wonky, as many Open Source Sofware does.
