2 posts tagged with "sketcher"

We’ve already introduced some improvements to sketching with constraints before, when Pierre-Louis Boyer implemented contextual constraints. But there are more usability gaps there, and we are targeting them one by one. There’s another major change currently undergoing code review: on-viewport tool widgets to create fully constrained sketches and tool settings to set various properties and choose drafting behavior.

One of the hallmark features of FreeCAD is that various parts of its UI have a lot of similar options, which means a lot of cognitive load, especially for beginners. A very popular “offender” here is the geometry constraints toolbar in Sketcher. It has 18 different constraint options, more than most popular commercial CAD offerings like Fusion 360, Onshape, and Creo. That's not a bad thing on its own, but it adds a lot of mileage when you need to dimension an entire complex sketch.