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Hi Ryan,

by Yorik on 22.07.2014

Commenting post 83: Hi Ryan,

Yes, no doubt. At the moment, I'm still using draftsight more out of laziness than anything else. We still work with many people who use 2D only, and it's an almost 100% dwg-based universe, with all its long-time (bad) habits, such as hundreds of small objects, bad-formatted blocks, redundant entities, hundreds of layers, etc. Dealing with those in FreeCAD is a pain in the ass, because it is not made for that kind of scenario. Having thousands of objects makes FreeCAD very slow to work with, and "packing" imported drawings into fewer objects makes them hard to edit.

Now, when you start new stuff from scratch, then doing it in FreeCAD already works quite well, up to exporting to dxf/dwg. But honestly nowadays I'm spending less time on the 2D tools there, my idea now about a proper architecture workflow is to reduce the 2D work to a minimum, I'm still looking at how to do that best. Of course I'd also like to get free from old-style 2D drafting apps like Draftsight, but on the other hand, I'm not sure how far it is interesting or useful to spend much time recreating or mimicking these tools in FreeCAD, if it is something that will become progressively obsoleted. Maybe it is more intelligent to leave that kind of tasks to such applications, and concentrate on more advanced stuff. I don't have a clear opinion on that yet...

One thing is clear to me, though, is that the more you use open-source tools and try to build your proper workflow out of tools that you adapt yourself, the more you end up using several different tools, a typical unix style, several simple tools that all do one taks well rather than complex all-in-one tools. For example the modeling speed you get with blender is something that you won't get easily with FreeCAD, and it would be silly not to use both applications. In that scope, it also makes sense to leave traditional 2D drafting to apps more suited to that task. The right place to put efforts, then, would be the interfaces between all these, that is, make sure data flows accurately between them.

Do you do 2D drafting in Revit? Is it efficient?

by Yorik on 22.07.2014