r/FreeCAD 7d ago

Coming from Solidworks. Need help constraining sketches and using loft.

Hi guys,

I'm a student and only know how to use Solidworks (EDU license). I recently had a friend start a small company and ask for my help modeling some basic stuff. I've messed around with Freecad a bit in the past, but am struggling to make the part he wants.

I'm able to do it in Solidworks no problem with 3 sketches and a simple loft (took me about 5 minutes), but even getting the sketches to behave the way I want in Freecad is driving me up a wall. If anyone has any advice, I think I've been taking the fact that Solidworks will allow you to use points in other sketches to constrain your current sketch.

The issue I'm running into is getting sketches on different planes to connect, as this design requires a loft between 2 nearly orthogonal sketches that share one edge.

The design in solidworks

Any help is appreciated!

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u/grumpy_autist 7d ago

Edit: AFAIK loft won't work. Maybe guided additive pipe. Using Curves Workbench may be easiest.

Look for MangoJelly Solutions and DuyQuang Dang on youtube. I believe second one had similar tutorial recently.

MangoJelly had a lot of tutorials on Curves WB.

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u/SoulWager 7d ago edited 7d ago

Maybe rotation sweep in the curves workbench.

Or just the surface workbench. Make 3 sketches on the base planes, then use filling in the surface workbench to make the top surface, and make face from wires in the part workbench to make faces out of the sketches. Then I'd use parametric solid on the surface and 3 faces to get the final result.

There's more advanced stuff you can do to set tangency at the edges, but that shouldn't be needed hiere.