Units are being implemented in FreeCAD, which will allow you to work with any unit you wish (even imperial units, you guys from the USA can be eternally grateful for this to Jürgen, FreeCAD's godfather and dictator).That means that automatic "wizard" tools that create complex geometry automatically, such as Arch Roof or Arch Stairs can only produce certain types of objects, and other tools that have presets, such as Arch Structure or Arch Window only have a couple of basic presets. Most Arch tools are still in development.This is worked on both by the FreeCAD and IfcOpenShell developers, and in the future we can expect full-powered IFC support. You can already import IFC files, quite reliably, provided IfcOpenShell is installed on your system, but exporting is still not officially supported. FreeCAD will have a complete Material system, able to define very complex materials, with all the goodies you can expect (custom properties, material families, rendering and visual aspect properties, etc), and the Arch Workbench will of course use it when it is ready. You can usually successfully import 2D files, but don't expect very high performance if you want to keep working on them in 2D. There is a reasonable set of tools for drawing and editing 2D objects with the Draft Workbench and Sketcher Workbench, but it is not made for handling very large (and sometimes badly drawn) 2D CAD files. Most are being worked on, though, and will disappear in the future. If you took care of the quality of your model and its objects are manifold solid shapes, turning them into architectural objects only requires the press of a button.Īt the time I'm writing this, though, the Arch Workbench, as the rest of FreeCAD, suffers some limitations. You can easily design an architectural model in a mesh-based application such as Blender or SketchUp and import it in FreeCAD. The Arch Workbench is very mesh-friendly.The Arch Workbench also inherits much of the Draft Workbench functionality, such as snapping and working planes. They will still retain their full modeling history, and continue being totally editable. You can design architectural objects with any other tool of FreeCAD, such as the PartDesign Workbench, and when they are ready, convert them to architectural objects. The whole power of FreeCAD is at your fingertips.Very complex things, usually hard to define in other BIM applications, like a floor slab curving up and becoming a wall (yes Zaha Hadid, it's you we're talking about), present no particular problem at all in FreeCAD. Any solid object can always become any architectural object. Walls don't need to be vertical, slabs don't need to look like slabs. ![]()
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