Nigel will be delighted to know he's not alone! I'm teaching myself Solid Edge at the moment and the way Sketch works is liable to confuse the beginner, especially one used to other packages. I can drive FreeCAD and Fusion360 with moderate skill. At first, they were confusing too!
Part of the problem is 3D-CAD tools have semi-automatic features. Unlike a pencil, which only goes where it's told on a flat sheet of paper, a CAD sketcher snaps to planes, lines, line-ends, edges and faces. Based on what the user is doing, the software jumps to the most likely intent. It's a wonderful time saver when the Sketcher is being driven skilfully, but liable to confuse a learner poking about with the mouse!
Getting started with 3D-CAD is like learning to ride a bike. Impossible to stay upright at first, then something clicks, and away you go.
Solid Edge's sketcher, and most other SE tools, require the coordinated use of the ESC, RETURN and F3 keys plus the right and left mouse buttons, AND hovering. Of these, F3 is the most important. It locks the sketch to a particular plane or face. If the operator fails to lock the wanted plane or face, Solid Edge can jump to whatever other feature is closest, so the next operation might be done in the wrong place. Very confusing!
Image is SE starting a new part with a sketch. It shows the operator can choose to draw in any of the 3 planes XZ(Front), XY(Top) or YZ(Right). YZ(Right) is highlighted in orange because SE guesses I want it based on where I have the mouse cursor. Note the F3 Padlock symbol: it's telling me that pressing the F3 key will lock whatever I do next to YZ(Right) until unlocked. Locking is good because it stops SE leaping about unexpectedly!
Hovering (gently moving the mouse over a wanted feature) is necessary because it allows the context of the next operation to be selected from a number of alternatives. The feature saves time compared with clicking a tool and selecting the object to be changed, but the operator has to make sure the operation he wants is ready to go. It's not always obvious what's going on – the beginner seems to get different results when he does exactly the same thing: actually he's not noticed the symbol next to the mouse pointer is changing…
I'm very taken with Solid Edge and will probably abandon F360 in favour of it. The main reason is SE does what I want locally and the Community Issue has a lifetime licence, whereas F360 is in the cloud and what bits of it work, or not, can be changed at any time by AutoDesk. For example, the current version of F360 is restricted to 10 open files at a time, which I find irksome.
Of the three, I've found Solid Edge most difficult to learn, and after 25 hours plus, the mouse/F3/ESC/RETURN thing still catches me out. But the more I practice, the better I get. SE's mix of Synchronous and Ordered operation is double edged too. Synchronous (wot?) is powerful and productive, but has no history which can make early mistakes difficult to fix – the tool suddenly flips from simple and obvious into impossible.
Fusion 360, I think, is easier to learn and use than SE and the way it handles Assemblies, joints and animations is more obvious to me. It's mouse interface has fewer complications too. On the other hand, SE appears to have features than simplify development of assemblies, in that parts can be developed in reference to another, eliminating the need to remember matching dimensions and positional relationships. Not explored this yet.
For producing singe parts rather than Assemblies, I found FreeCAD easiest once I realised almost all Mechanical Engineering is done with the Parts Design Workbench, and the others can mostly be ignored. I think FreeCAD's Sketcher is the most straightforward of the three I've used, and F360 is similar.
3D sketches are a major booby trap for anyone used to 2D-Drawing. First hurdle is they seem unacceptably primitive, lacking layers and many other 2D drawing essentials and conveniences. Second hurdle, is that superficially simple Sketches hide an important new concept – constraints. Constraints include the usual linear dimensions and angles plus relationship enforcing rules. At first lines in a sketch are connected to other lines, such that the whole can move and stretch until locked down. Locking down is important: lines can be told to be vertical, or horizontal, or at a fixed angle. They can be forced to be equal in length to other lines, or parallel, tangent, symmetric or locked in a particular position. Understanding the need and value of constraints is blocker at first, but the student has to grip it.
So far none of the CAD packages I've learned have been easy! All frustrating at first, apparently deliberately unfriendly and illogical. Not so. Once the logic and workflow is understood, they're all good.
MOI might be easier to learn. Blowlamp recommended it in the Cotton Reel thread, and his video links certainly make it look easy! I've not had time to try MOI yet, and I'm only about 10% into Solid Edge.
Horses for courses, I still prefer FreeCAD for simple parts. This despite Fusion 360 and Solid Edge both being more advanced. They pay off when more complex work is at hand. Learning to fly, or just for pleasure, I suggest a Tiger Moth is a better choice than a Jumbo Jet.
Dave
Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 06/05/2022 11:11:44