The Data tab contains information regarding its location, size, angle, etc. The View tab contains information about what the cube looks like: its color, opacity, whether it is visible or not, etc. Click on it to highlight it, and the bottom box will fill with information regarding your cube. Getting back to your piece, notice FreeCAD has also added a new cube item to the list of Labels & Attributes in the Combo View on the left. FreeCAD does autosave, but, just in case, press Ctrl+s often. It must be said here that FreeCAD is quite stable, with the operative word in the prior clause being "quite." It has been known to happen that yours truly got carried away making a really complex piece and then… Poof! FreeCAD disappeared, taking a bunch of unsaved changes with it. To get the cube, click on the cube icon in the workbench's colorful toolbar, and it will appear in the workspace on the right.įigure 2: The Part workbench lets you work with geometric primitives and use Boolean operations to shape complex pieces. Click on the workbench drop-down, choose Part, and you'll get something like what is shown in Figure 2 (sans the cube). If you want to jump right in, I'd recommend you start with the Part workbench.įrom the start screen, pick Create new… (or press Ctrl+n) to create a new, blank project. Let's try and sort it all out with some examples. Quite the contrary: The number of options and all the rules you have to follow to get a valid piece that will actually print is quite daunting. However, knowing all this does not help you get any closer to actually producing a piece. You can acquire even more by going to Tools | Addon Manager from the program's menu.
FreeCAD's modular nature means users can create their own specific desktops to scratch their own specific itches.Īnd create they do: When you open FreeCAD, there is a drop-down menu in the middle of the top toolbar, which shows more than 20 preinstalled desktops. There are also custom desktops for preparing a piece for 3D printing for architectural design for screws, bolts, and other fasteners for rendering photorealistic (ahem!) images from your pieces and so on. So, for example, you will have one workbench (with its own set of tools, especially designed for drafting pieces), another for turning the shapes into an actual 3D object, another for assembling several pieces together into a device, and another to produce the blueprints that you can share with a manufacturer. Workbenches are distinct areas especially designed for specific tasks within the 3D-design workflow.
One of the interesting things about FreeCAD is that, apart from your typical items-and-properties-on-the-left-workspace-on-the-right layout, it adds a third dimension to the interface: workbenches.
Freecad tutorials windows#
There are also versions of FreeCAD that work on Windows and macOS. I will be using the current version 0.18 in this article.
However, if you want an up-to-date version, something I strongly recommend, you will probably have to check out the "extra software" repositories (e.g., PPAs, AURs, or whatever).įreeCAD also has an AppImage of the latest stable version. Installing FreeCAD is easy enough: Most Linux distributions list it in their regular repositories. Figure 1: FreeCAD is a very complete CAD system that lets you import pieces from OpenSCAD.
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