I beg to differ. Using Part Design, which means sketches, is a whole new world to learn. Part WB is immediately intuitive because you only give dimensions. I tried Maui’s Manipulator and it does what was promised, thank you. Now I can easily create simple parts within minutes.
Remember that I was talking about simple models which can be abstracted to one or three boxes and cylinders. No pins, no chamfers or roundings, just 90 degree corners.
Taking Sprig’s button, these are roughly the steps:
- Create a cube, edit l/w/h.
- Create a cylinder, edit radius/height.
- Select the bottom of the cube and center it on X/Y with the aligner tools of Manipulator.
- Select each of the two shapes and give them material or color.
- Now it’s ready to be exported with StepUp.
Actually the most difficult part (excuse the pun) is learning how to use the aligner tools (presuming you already know how to use StepUp). Like the rest of FreeCAD, the UI isn’t the most intuitive. But with Part Design there would be no hope of completing this without following at least one full-blown tutorial. I have gone through some of them and already forgotten what I learned. It can’t happen with the Part WB.