Not related to BIM, but FreeCAD has intrigued me these last few days of Christmas vacation. My dad bought a 3D printer and I've helped him with it, so I've realized it's time I buy one as well.
Most people recommended Fusion 360 but I personally found it a bit annoying to work with, especially seeing that it's basically a webapp. I wanted a real native app to work with, so I went ahead and downloaded FreeCAD. It's also open source and seems to have a thriving community.
Anyone else got some opinions or experiences to share on FreeCAD for beginners?
I use FreeCAD whenever possible.
It's a very capable cad, despite the limitations.
My main complaint is that history management in FreeCAD is poor, and the ability to assemble parts is very, very limited currently.
That is: create a sketch, extrude, and fillet 2 edges at random. FreeCAD seem to use some incredibly naive edge enumeration technique, which breaks instantly as soon as you add/remove edges from the underlying sketch. This makes design revisions almost impossible currently, which is the primary reason you use a parametric cad for.
OpenCascade in itself is not as bad as people make it to be. It's a bit buggy, but not drastically more so than fusion 360. In fact, you learn to work around most geometric kernel issues in any parametric cad with time. All of them have bugs and corner cases. OCC itself has never been a limitation for most of my designs.
FreeCAD combined with CadQuery is immensely more powerful than most commercial offerings I've tried. I dream of being able to interleave CadQuery and FreeCAD sketches at any point in history to prototype!
I tried both FreeCAD and SolveSpace [1] a couple of years ago on Linux, to design a custom computer desk that had to fit into a fixed space, so a parametric CAD with constraints was useful.
For that purpose SolveSpace was a lot more stable (IIRC it only ever crashed once, whereas FreeCAD crashed a lot more often). YMMV those bugs may already be fixed by now, but if you are having trouble with it I'd definitely recommend trying Solvespace, and in either case save often!
[1] http://solvespace.com/index.pl
I used to really like google sketchup for drawing and planing remodeling projects ..and I've been looking for an alternative for a while.
Funny thing - I've also been using FreeCAD for a while for 3d printing and didn't even know about / understand the BIM features (I just didn't spend much time digging around in all the features).
Thankfully I recently discovered the BIM features on youtube - and find them very cool even if slightly more difficult to use than sketchup.
They discuss this here when comparing to 'the commercial alternatives we all know'. Key things they admit it is bad at are user friendliness and 2d output. Both are pretty essential for serious use in the architecture / construction industry.
Though before revit was bought by autodesk it was probably in a similar point (2d drawing was really poor).
I think the biggest open source success in related industries is still qGIS. I hope this can be replicated in the architectural CAD sector. If so though i think it will have to offer something else. FreeCAD is pushing the best BIM integration which is great. But if you talk to a lot of architects right now they are excited about Grasshopper and Dynamo visual programming which the attached says is yet to come in freecad. Heres hoping it turns out well. My view is that if it does this well and picks up for 2d drawing it could be a serious competitor
Also, Revit is still hot garbage (from what I've seen as a non-full-time user); and the data you produce in it are generally trapped forever. Even if you have every other Autodesk product, your data don't transfer reliably out of Revit to those, and even less do they transfer anywhere else.
This is neat! I didn't know this, or FreeCAD, existed.
For a complete layman who wants to design a house eventually, how deep should one go with a more detailed design in FreeCAD or similar tool? Is a rough design in something like SketchUp and getting an architect involved the way to go? In does anyone have general tips or resources for such a project?
Lots of professional architects and interior designers use SketchUp. One of SketchUp’s advantages is the library of pre-built components available for standard doors, windows, etc. Instead of designing everything from scratch, you can search for a “French door” and then place it where you want it. That way you’re choosing from standards compliant elements so when the builder goes to Home Depot to purchase a window it will be available in the desired size.
FreeCAD is great (I’ve used it a lot) and people should definitely continue to invest in making it better. It’s great for 3D printing. Plus, it’s fully scriptable in Python so cool automation or parameterization things are possible.
Just use Sketchup, I did the drawings for my new office in Sketchup, took it to a construction engineer who remodel it in some professional tool and I got back all the numbers I needed for my permit.
I really wanted to use FreeCAD but I cant afford to spend that amount of time needed to learn to work with it....
One of the huge disadvantages of SketchUp, is that it doesn't create geometry which is easily (and accurately) shared with other CAD/CAM systems. :(
Any kind of export/import to standard CAD/CAM model formats (STEP, IGES, even JT) would do.
(Note - I last looked a few months ago, so it's possible something has changed since then. Wouldn't bet money on it though, as it seems to be "in purpose" but I'm not sure why.)
FreeCAD on the other hand does use the right kind of geometry, and imports/exports the right formats natively. Your construction engineer would likely have been able to import a FreeCAD created model directly, instead of having to remodel it from scratch. Assuming the model was created decently well of course. ;)
"In FreeCAD, Python code can be used to create various elements programmatically, without needing to click on the graphical user interface. Additionally, many tools and workbenches of FreeCAD are programmed in Python."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_information_modelin...