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. Since cutting through 3D objects with a 2D plane, in order to extract sections, is also a boolean operation, you can immediately see the importance of this point.Īrchitectural objects can always have any shape.

This ensures a much more error-free workflow, and very reliable boolean operations. From FreeCAD's strong mechanical background, we learned the importance of always working with solid objects. Here are, for example, a couple of interesting features of FreeCAD's Arch Workbench that you'll hardly find in other BIM apps:Īrchitectural objects are always solids. As it is still under development, don't expect to find here the same tools and level of completion as grown-up commercial alternatives such as Revit or ArchiCAD, but on the other hand, FreeCAD being used in a much bigger scope than these applications, the Arch Workbench greatly benefits from the other disciplines FreeCAD caters to, and offers some features rarely seen in traditional BIM applications. The purpose of the Arch Workbench is to offer a complete BIM workflow inside FreeCAD. Also check our tutorials section, and on youtube you will also find a lot more of FreeCAD tutorials. The Getting started page is a must read, if you have no previous experience with FreeCAD.

In any case, you should be prepared to look for yourself for further information about how FreeCAD works on the FreeCAD documentation wiki. I will try to make it simple enough so you don't need any previous experience with FreeCAD, but having some experience with 3D or BIM applications will be useful. This tutorial aims at giving you the basics to work with the Arch Workbench.

Freecad 2d drawing tutorial