FreeCAD and SVG output

Putting your drawing on a SVG sheet in FreeCAD is beginning to work well. Here is a recent example:

In FreeCAD:


And the outputted SVG:


It is almost perfect, I still have a small problem regarding texts location (there is a shift between both), and the svg hatches which are not too good and for which I still didn't find a solution.

Download the .fcstd file here and the .svg file here.

More on FreeCAD, or Generative Components-like workflow on Linux

I did this interesting little chain yesterday, you might find it interesting. With a bit of trickery, you can really do some interesting parametric-generated architecture design on linux, only with open-source tools. And when I say architecture design, I mean the whole production chain, from conception to paper prints.

If you don't know Generative Components, it's a piece of software made to design architecture compositions based on sets of parameters that you can make evolve to create "beautiful" parametric-looking structures... I recently discovered an amazing application called StructureSynth which does exactly that: create geometry based on parameters and rules.

You design simple rules in a very simple language, such as: "Rule n°1: move 2 units in x, rotate 15° in y, then create a box, then reapply Rule n°1". Then, all the magic is here: You can specify another, different Rule n°1. The program will interpolate both randomly, and create randomic variations:



The version of StructureSynth in the Debian repositories comes with a set of exporters for different renderers such as Sunflow, and Blender, (with the help of a blender import script) which I used here to import the geometry:



The blender import script imported all the geometry as one single object, so I first separated it in original parts (Edit mode, select all, P -> separate all loose parts), then exported it as an .obj file, that < href=http://free-cad.sf.net>FreeCAD can read. Of course the blender import script could easily be adapted to FreeCAD so we could skip the Blender step, but I found it interesting to show how the geometry passes from one to another without any data loss.



FreeCAD can work with several types of geometry. Our .obj file was imported as Meshes, but much more interesting is to work with bRep objects, which are FreeCAD's "native" object type, and permit much more complex functionality (they have the notion of "solid", so boolean ops work perfectly, they can have real curved surfaces, etc). So I converted my meshes to brep parts with a macro, and added a couple of lines just to show you how 3D and 2D begin to mix well in FreeCAD.

The Draft module in FreeCAD can already give you nice results when putting your scene geometry on a sheet. Of course the Draft module is made for 2D, so you'll notice the 3D parts are not displaying very correctly (face inversions, mostly), but that problem will be addressed soon.



To show you better the possibilities of the Geometry-to-paper process, I did another example. It suffers the same problems as the one above, but the control over display (colors, line width, texts, etc...) begins to be good.



This is a quick structure I did just to play with the process, and here is the SVG output:



SVG files already carry informations such as paper size, and it is as reliable as pdf (you can easily turn them as pdf with apps that support svg such as Inkscape or directly from FreeCAD). At the moment the informations in the template (Project author, etc...) cannot be edited directly from within FreeCAD, so you need to edit your sheet in another app, but that also will probably be addressed one of these days.

What's new on the FreeCAD front

There are several cool new things coming to FreeCAD so I decided to show you a bit of what's going on. Most of this stuff will be in the 0.11 release (no release date prevision, it's done when it's done). There is a 0.11 preview installer for windows on the FreeCAD website, otherwise you'll have to wait a bit (or compile FreeCAD yourself if you are brave enough). I'll focus more on the 2D part, since it's what I'm mostly doing there...

The most interesting thing that has been added recently by Werner is python-driven Part objects. Unlike the older python Document objects, where you had to do everything, compute the geometry, and define how that geometry gets displayed in the 3D scene, the new Part python objects automatically display their geometry the "standard FreeCAD way". That allows for extremely simple python objects such as this:

class Line:
    def __init__(self, obj):
        ''' App two point properties '''
        obj.addProperty("App::PropertyVector","p1","myCategory","Start point")
        obj.addProperty("App::PropertyVector","p2","myCategory","End point").p2=FreeCAD.Vector(1,0,0)
        obj.Proxy = self
 
    def execute(self, obj):
        ''' Print a short message when doing a recomputation, this method is mandatory '''
        obj.Shape = Part.makeLine(obj.p1,obj.p2)
 
ml=FreeCAD.ActiveDocument.addObject("Part::FeaturePython","myLine")
Line(ml)

As a result, the 2D drafting module has been completely upgraded to take advantage of this. One of the most useful consequences is that it now has an editmode. But it also allows for several other goodies, such as enter FreeCAD's parametric chain (for example, an object made of the union of two other objects retains the original objects, etc):



Because of this, the use of the Drawing module is now much easier, and you can already output much better sheets:





Another area that is being currently worked on by Jürgen is the Sketcher, which allows you to draw constrained 2D shapes. There is still not much new stuff visible, but it has been almost rewritten from scratch, and is now much more stable and works on all platforms. Now really the sketcher can be used to build geometry.



Of course all this is pretty new and lots of bugs are expected to appear, but we come everyday closer to the day we can start to do serious productive work with FreeCAD. As a sidenote, one of the things we lack badly is bug reporting. If you happen to find a bug, if you make FreeCAD crash and can reproduce the cause of the crash, don't hesitate and add a report to the bug tracker. This is a very important for FreeCAD to reach some stability...

Playing with FreeCAD...

I just made this little "thing" while searching for a cool new splash screen. I got very impressed by Form:uLA yesterday (specially this work)... Kind of 3D Lebbeus Woods...







The FreeCAD file is here...