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Thank you, really appreciate the tutorial! Going to start learning Ondsel today as a 9 year SolidWorks user :)

Hi, how did you center the rectangle at this moment? How did you get a center point from the two construction lines?

Thank you for making this video, it saved me so much time in troubleshooting and learning. I hope you keep making videos like these!

Thank you for the informative videos! Would you be interested in revisiting this subject with the recent releases of FreeCAD?

Maybe I'll just use paper and pencil. Probably a lot faster. lol. Anyway thanks for the vid.

Name your pad lengths and required sketch constraints. Use them instead of projecting volatile objects. Even projecting sketch objects is ok. If you relevant sketches visible it's easier to see what is real. Once you have teached a point of surety use simple-copy. You can still scale, move and boolean.

thats a nice work of parametric analysis using FEM

This does not work. If I change the parameters of the model the datum planes do not change position. I now have to link the datum plane parameters to the model parameters which is a lot of work. This is marginally better than topological naming problems but not by much. Have the FreeCAD developers not hear us? Fix the topological naming problem, period! Instead they are adding new features and pretending like having a parametric modeler that does not accept changes to parameters is okay. We should all be using FreeCAD Link Branch and abandon FreeCAD until they get onboard.

just hitting m again will change the polyline type while the tools is still active. That whole perimeter of the first sketch can be done with one polyline.

TNP is really a misnomer. It is a topographical renumbering/renaming flaw. I wonder why they refer to it as being "topological" .

th-cam.com/video/dg7aSDL6CIU/w-d-xo.html (Freecad?????)

Thank you for your amazing explanation on top-down design. I started on working on a written tutorial based on your video. Unfortunatelly I wasn't able to send you my donation, since it's not possible to pay via PayPal.

Thank you for this video. @1:15, did you hit a shortcut on your keyboard, not exactly sure what command you used there.

sweet capability.. I think I am going to jump to FreeCad and python.

Great video idea, thank's

won't it be easier to create master plan in two planes and then reference it?

Hot tip: When you're using the polyline tool, you can press the "M" key to circle through behaviors! One of them is arc, so there's no need to switch to the dedicated arc tool and then back to polyline.

The shape binder approach seems robust, but given you have to sketch over it, how does it work when the sketch geometry is more complicated than a square, or if the geometry changes?

This is very helpful, thank you. I see you're separating the bodies into separate files, with one body per file. In general, would you avoid having multiple bodies in a file? Part Design has the yellow "Part" container, but I've never really understood the best way to organise these things

pity you can't speak without uttering "uh" in between every word.

Great video, thanks for sharing. One thing I did on initial sketch was start with a construction line bounding box as a reference, seemed to speed up the sketch.

Nice run .. Thank You for sharing .. Cheers :)

It looks interesting. Currently planning on learning about FreeCAD myself. Learning about CAD design but it's open source and free, compared to AutoCAD.

This explains why I was having issues with pipes, very helpful, thanks...

So this video is for the more pro users?! Shame cause I didn't understand a word. For me it sounds like just use as many datum-planes as possible 😂

Wow... Nice work. I will try this next week on my design. Habe you ever heard form evolutionary algorithms?

Wow thank you.... This is what i was looking for so long

This has to be one of the most helpful single freecad videos I've watched! Especially calling out the shortcuts as you're using them

Thank you for your video! It was very helpful for me. :)

I was thrilled to find your video on top-down design in FreeCad. I am retired and recently have been working on some hobbyist designs after doing years of mechanical cad design in industry. Just starting to learn FreeCad. I became a proponent of top-down design years ago (in both ProE and Inventor) when I discovered how much faster it is with the TDD process to make dimensional changes in an assembly that might affect hundreds of parts, and possibly hundreds of associated parts drawings. I also made it a practice to include kinematics geometry in the same top level skeleton, to allow for animation and simulation analysis of the assembly. I will be interested to see if FreeCad also includes that possibility, but learning how to make it work for a set of parts will be a great start for me in my very simple hobbyist designs. Thanks again for sharing this brilliant video!

The "external geometry" option is nice in theory, but unless you are 110% sure you won't ever touch the "external" shape (whatever it is) again, it is just a recipe for a continuously breaking model. I'm avoiding it like the plague. I wish you could simply name an edge (or vertex) of a sketch and any reference would be to that name (and you'd get a warning if you try to delete a named and referenced edge). In pads or revolves the extruded faces (or in case of an "extruded" vertex) should automatically name themselves with the same name. Then external geometry might actually be more useful than a hassle.

Thank you for taking the time to make this useful tutorial.

Great Tutorial! Also checked your videos on FEA simulations, have you ever tried automating this type of assembly change and recomputing from a python script?

Awesome! 😍 thanks for making this! Keep up the great work! 👌

You've got a "Centered Rectangle" tool, there's no need to draw construction lines.

As someone with a programming background this workflow feels natural to me because it allows properties to be propagated independently to many parts. However I always seem to keep running into issues when updating the master sketches. I am aware of the topological naming problem in freecad so obviously creating new edges or deleting edges from master sketches is bound to have issues in parts that reference geometry in the master sketches. What's not so obvious to me is that just modifying the constraints values (for instance changing the diameter of a circle just slightly) can also break references for some reason. There is no way to manually name the edges so I guess this will always be a problem? Updating external geometry references in sketches is also extremely difficult since you have to delete the references and re-add them which makes you lose all of your constraints... How do you cope with this?

Excellent. Thx.

Am I the only FreeCAD user to think the TNP is a big joke, that it only exists because people will it to exist, by doing things The Wrong Way ? I had never used any CAD software ever before 6 weeks ago and FreeCAD is the only one I've used. Working my way through some of the tutorials, most of them wanted me to sketch on a surface that was dependent on some other operation. With no prior knowledge of the TNP, my response to this was 'WTF' - what happens if that surface is changed to be too small or gets split into multiple planes ? I decided there and then to design all my design parts separately, combining them geometrically using numbers from a spreadsheet. Then I came across various WB tools which require me to specify a face# or an edge #. Again, WTF ? This is like declaring an int in a programming language and then writing code assuming that that int will always have a fixed location in memory, or a fixed offset on the stack.

THANK YOU SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO MUCH!!!!!!

There is no reason to look for ways to work around a very serious bug. Forget main branch and use the linkstage branch which no longer suffers this issue

Very informative.😎 Hint 1: @ 2:25 you can add an arc to your polyline by pressing M on the keyboard three times. Hint 2 : If you extend an arc by a polyline, you will automatically have a tangency constraint. Just press M twice on the keyboard to avoid this constraint.

Thank you thank you thank you for this amazing tutorial video. Super informative and easy to follow. Really appreciate your effort to make the video and share your knowledge with us.

Great video. One thing escapes me: 2.6" you created a DatumPlane and few seconds later deleted it. What was it? I'm newbie, so pls. excuse my ignorance 🙂

Very interesting! Looks like a great assistance in the making!

This video showed up at exactly the right time! I have been learning FreeCAD for the last couple weeks and was about to leave it behind. I had hit a point where I was spending hours "fixing" my models when they would break for whatever reason they were breaking. Spending an hour creating models and the spending 10 hours incessantly crawling back through the model and trying guess how to fix stuff that broke was burning the last bit of patience I had for the thing. Based on your explanation it seems I had diagnosed the issue correctly but I had no idea the issue had a name nor did I know the issue is kind of intrinsic to 3D modelling. I am a programmer and could see many of the issues the FreeCAD programmers would have been dealing with in their data structures. Until this video, however, I had reached the conclusion that they had simply chosen their data structures poorly and were now stuck with years of legacy that guaranteed the issue would basically never go away. Also, ironically, I can also see that my fixing attempts worked just fine but pretty much guaranteed the issue would remain no matter what I did. This is because most of my fixes involved forcibly going in and picking the same (to me) face that it had just completely forgotten about. I can now see that this would only humorously keep the problem as bad as it always was and possibly make it worse. I am already heavily using spreadsheet, variable names, etc. (mostly defaulted to that because that is what I would do if programming it ... ala OpenSCAD) but I knew nothing about the datum pieces nor that they could solve the problem I was having that I knew everybody must already know about but had a name I was oblivious to and a workflow that could lessen it or remove the issue entirely. Thank you, my friend. I will try this approach out when I get home from work tonight and I am hopeful that it will make me happy to use FreeCAD again! 🙂

The Macro "CenterOfMass" lets you enter basic materials to get mass output. Works great and allow to have many bodies with different properties. It is very interesting.

Great explanation and great video.

Thanks. I've had issues trying to make parametric models so this is a good guide to get in the right path.

Cool, thanks again!

Could pls let me know how to implement the freecadparametericfea to advanced versions of python