this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
186 points (99.5% liked)
Hacker News
4577 readers
425 users here now
Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.
The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's not a bug, that's how FreeCAD works. You don't select areas, you can select either the entire sketch or individual wires to Pad. Which is a different verb to Extrude.
But that genuinly didn't work too. Also there was a tutorial video that did select areas.
It's possible that was for a fork or experimental branch, I don't think it's in the standard issue.
Regardless, i also tried two separate sketsches for 2 separate bodies but that was genuinly bugging out.
I'll 100% believe that; because FreeCAD has that FOSS disease where it was designed by programmers for programmers to program, not designed for users to use. It refuses to "know what you mean" the way some other programs might.
In FreeCAD, a Body is an entity that contains exactly one contiguous shape. You cannot create a sketch with two shapes that do not intersect in any way and then Pad two separate shapes out of it. Not through the Part workflow, anyway. You have to create two separate Bodies, and then create a Sketch for each of them.
That might explain it, but i refuse to see it as my mistake, i am sure you understand. I might try that later. Thanks.
Yeah I don't either; there's no use in being one of those "GIMP is just as good as Photoshop you just don't use it right" neckbeards here; FreeCAD could be more user friendly; I've been using it for years, I've designed multiple projects in it, and I still run into things that should be simple, that it SHOULD work this way, but it doesn't, because it's not designed to be a useful tool for end users, it's designed to be a project for its programmers. Adding text to a 3D model shouldn't be as hard as it is, for example.
Some of that improved around 1.0, partially via an injection of money from the Ondsel project such as it was, and partially by some old blood leaving.