I am an Architect by trade and I am trying to understand whether or not FreeCAD can be adopted by a small/medium Architectural firm at all.
Today is day 4 that I am testing the software full time, I have read most of the wiki documentation, a few of the most recent Yorik’s posts, as well as a number of tutorials and reviews on Youtube. I come from the CAD 2D old school world and have basic knowledge of 3D, strong planning & construction background.
So far I have tested both versions 0.18 and 0.19 on Linux Ubuntu 18.04 and macOS 10.13 and got mixed feelings…
On a macOS 10.13:
Nice GUI but too many crashes and random bugs, I would not use it.
On a Linux Ubuntu 18.04:
It kind of makes sense. V0.19 is reasonably stable, although there are still a number of bugs I bumped into from time to time. Some very basic functionality, like moving a building from A to B or even the Undo function, are (in my experience) unusable, which is not acceptable by itself. Then I found glitches and inconsistencies are quite common anyway, although “kind of workaroundable”…
So, for now I am near to a no… but I’ll keep testing it, as I feel it has great potential to become a winner.
But what about your experience? Are you able to produce decent paid work with FreeCAD and with what sort of compromises? What type of projects are you comfortable to work with?
Please share your experience, it would be really helpful not only for me but for many people considering to seriously give FreeCAD a go!
It seem @Yorik and others can really master a mixture of available software and do design and documentation in reasonable scale - Yorik’s blog show a few.
Whilst I have been trying to use/learn FreeCAD (I had been an AutoCAD user for more than 10 years, really 10 years ago), I am trying with my limited knowledge in Python and FreeCAD to improve the workflow experience in design development particular on floor plan layout, which is one aspect I think improvement is needed.
Good luck, there should be more peoples providing comments
I am architect too.
I use FreeCAD in my work.
A lot of people used it in their work, too.
I needed a lot more than 4 days to learn FC and even much more time to incorporate it in an efficient workflow.
That is how it is.
Hi TexWheela,
i read your post abv, i am probably just a bit ahead of you in FC ! but I can share with you the following:
I have used microstation, archicad and revit for decades to produce CD’s.
Tired of subscriptions, etc ! i looked for an open source software, and after trying a few, i picked FC,
the first thing i did was to make sure i can produce
a set of construction documents and you perfectly can; the rest is just to learn how to model things and learn the architectural
tools. But 4 days is not gonna cut it TW! way more than that. Bitacovir has a great video how to use the arch WB and others to produce
drawings, Yoric also has a vgood one. Also very important, is to coordinate the design work among subs, and for that there is
subject here or in OSARCH, of a team sharing the construction docs process thru IFC and it worked very well. https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=49030#p419814
Surprise that you had crashes, FC version 019 is very stable in a high sierra mbp
do not give up, this forum is full of experts willing to help (they might hit you from time to time but thats ok )
I think 4 days would also not be enough to decide, for example, between Revit and ArchiCAD. Learning Revit if you come from a 2D CAD environment certainly takes far more than 4 days. Don’t desist just yet, the learning curve is indeed still a bit too steep, but I don’t think I’m lying if I say that all of us who got there, nobody thinks it was lost time and nobody wants to go back to proprietary apps. You definitely CAN do serious, professional Arch work with FreeCAD. I do it, and so do many others here. Don’t consider it as a “package” that you can just switch to, because you want to replace your current solution, that will simply not work. There are too many differences, too much to change in your current workflow when you change a CAD solution (not only FreeCAD, it would be the same thing with just any other)
Instead, try keeping it aside, use it for a small project, or part of a project, where you have a bit more time to dedicate so you can experiment, and soon you’ll begin to take advantage of the unique features of FreeCAD (total parametricity, etc) and see how useful it can be, I dare say it surpasses everything else in many areas.
That said, indeed FreeCAD is still too hard for who comes from the 2D world. There is not enough learning material to either make the “upgrade” to 3D smoothly or stick with 2D. But that’s mostly a documentation problem. The work needed on FreeCAD itself is not that much.
There is still a series of small tweaks and improvements to make if we want to make of FreeCAD a good and fast 2D platform like, let’s say, AutoCAD LT, though. Most of them could even be coded by people with not much experience. I’d really like to have more people like you coming and helping to build a good list of those features.
Another full day of testing… and thanks to everyone that replied so far. I think the picture is getting clearer and clearer.
I can see that complex projects can be made within FreeCAD. However, how long do they take to complete, compared to using a more “industry proof” alternative? I mean, in an architectural practice, like in any other business, time saving is essential, don’t you agree?
Anyway, I would like to share my initial views. I guess my issue so far is not as much with “learning the software” but to deal with the bugs and glitches. For example, very basic tasks like:
the positioning a window right at the center of a room’s wall, is challenging - there seems to be no intuitive way around.
the use of snaps, which sometimes work and sometimes don’t
moving the whole building from A to B, just doesn’t work right as it messes everything up.
undo the tasks is not consistent, it doesn’t exactly go back step by step but it jumps
What am I learning so far? More than the documentation, I feel I am pushed to learn on how to avoid glitches and bugs, plus some workarounds. This takes loads of patience and motivation, I can’t see how a professional is supposed to cope with this!
So to summarize, IMO, it’s fine to take time to learn the software, while it’s not fine to learn how to avoid bugs and inconsistent behaviors. Of course, I guess it’s leave it or take it, understandable. However, to leave a constructive comment I would like to add:
I would focus more on improving and fixing the basic functionality, rather than adding more and more complex functions. For example, it’s not useful to have a fully parametric window if I don’t have a way to quickly and precisely position it wherever I want it on a wall. I would very much prefer to have a simpler window design, but the ability to easily positioning it in 2D, chose the base point, choose the middle of a wall, choose the distance from a wall, etc.
I would rather fix the move function before anything else. What if I made my amazing building, then I have to position it within my allotment? No way at the moment, objects just do not move all together and the model struggles to refresh/recalculate anyway. The move issue alone is enough to put a professional off, no questions.
I would suggest publishing a road map of FreeCAD’s development (apologies if there is and I haven’t found it). This way users are aware of at what stage of the development the software is. In fact, at the moment I wouldn’t be able to tell whether we are far, close, very close from the release of a professionally acceptable version. Many users would love to make plans and start exploring FreeCAD as a secondary software, in the view of completely adopt in in, say, 1, 2 or 3 years time when a fine version has been released. Instead, for now I feel pretty much in the dark, while of course I appreciate Yorik’s development updates and some other users’ speculations.
For the moment I am collecting all bugs and glitches and issues in a log book. Can share it with the developers if of any help..
I learn from your website that you are a collaborator to the FreeCAD development, It is expected that you normally use FreeCAD for your work. As just a humble architect with limited IT skills, am I expected to learn coding and start getting into the development arena, in order to master FreeCAD?
This discussion is very valid, thanks @TexWheela for starting it.
I am an engineer and have been not working with project development for over 10 years, I have only worked in project coordination, especifically in financial coordination.
In my region, BIM is not yet popularized, and one of the impediments to it is the high costs of software licenses, when we have some cities that have difficulty paying for architects / engineers and provide a minimum structure for the job.
I see FreeCAD as an opportunity for these small institutions to equip themselves and implement BIM, but for that the learning curve has to be smooth, especially for those who come from 2D design.
My initial objective was to get to know FreeCAD and evaluate the possibility of using it for my work on feasibility analysis of projects and financial planning.
I’m very excited about the possibility of running scripts in python, which is a very friendly language, and after reading this forum I got excited about the professional uses described here.
Despite being less a week studying the system, I am very excited in the search to understand the workflow to start writing scripts and, perhaps to contribute to the development of FreeCAD.
Thanks to all the developers, I know how hard is this work.
Hello @TexWheela,
Thank you for taking an interest in freecad. I thought maybe I can give you my general sense of things well based on my general experience.
if you come from a 2D workflow, implementing freecad is not straight forward as the mindset in thinking is very different.
If you come from a 3D workflow, freecad modeling is actualy great for basic design (boxy and squarish shapes) (It can handle complex designs but it is not yet streamlined i.e curves and weird shapes)
It is certain that there will be glitches here and there as the soft is always in development. But once you have solid experience with the soft usually you know how to get around these glitches effortlessly for the most part.
Like Yorik suggested, don’t think of freecad as a means to replace your entire workflow just yet, try to identify small parts of the your workflow and begin implementing freecad until those workflows are secure. It might take consistent time to fully transition and entire architectural practice into just freecad. Every practice has a different workflow for everything, so and advice i might give you might not work for another company, this is why it is recommended to start a slow implementation.
Althought you are not there yet, where freecad is still fairly week is in handling mega projects which there are constant changes at every aspect of the design build stage of a project. Freecad can do the job but because there are lots of useful tools not emplimented you will not have the efficiency required to get those size projects out of the door at the speed required.
Another area of freecad’s weekness is fully documented sheets layouting, there is still a great deal of manual work to do here (so freecad’s documentation has the same speed as that of a 2D program but not as fast as that of a 3D program where lots of stuffs is already automatic)
Freecad’s strenght is really in it’s modeling capabilities, if you a single guy or a small firm, freecad can handle small team projects quite well when it comes to modeling.
Learning curve is not so fast, but also not too slow. There are some places where freecad has modelling advantage over other commercial software, meanwhile there are other areas where it has disadvantage especially if you come from a fully automatic.
But in general i can agree with you that the glitches and bugs can be somewhat frustrating when you are pinched with time constraints. But if you have some time on hand, learn freecad on the side with a casual project, you will have more fun discovering and appreciating the potential it can offer.
BTW @TexWheela, @Regis is creator of a numbers of Youtube tutorials, and creator of FreeCAD model of the famous Quinta Monroy (2003) designed by Elemental studio.
@bitacovir is creator of a numbers of famous building models:-
the famous Farnsworth house (1951) designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
the Farnsworth House
the Church of the Light (1989) designed by Tadao Ando
the Maison Dom-Ino (1915) designed by Le Corbusier
FreeCad is a really good project and obviously very powerful. However it is really difficult to utilise that power if some of the basics do not work. Given time I might start to understand the code and be able to help, however for now I need to get use to the application, the ability to do CAD projects end to end, makes it far more likely that people will stick with and help develop FreeCAD. I’m therefore adding my encouragement to make sure the basics are working well.
I’ll give two examples that I have found FreeCAD very difficult to use for a project and making me doubt whether I can continue to use it.
The copy and move function seem not to work, for anything but the most simple objects If they do work they are not obvious enough to the end user with the documentation not being detailed enough for me to get them to work. I’ve made another post on this here. I can get round this by doing it all manually, but that is not efficient
I can sort of show them using the wire view but it really is not up to the standards people expect today. The solid view looks far more professional, unfortunately it does not show curves. So I have produce beautiful projects in 3D, export them and do walkthoughs and visual impact assessments, however, in the end the plans and elevations are needed, and this cannot not be done from FreeCAD. Maybe there is a way to export the 3D, slice it in Blender or the like, but that is lots of additional work, which probably needs to be redone, even for the simplest change.
Andrew,
Revisit your statement about FC not being able to produce sections, elevations , CD’s !! Very capable Andrew
… reminds me of the PLOTMAKER era of archicad and
I recommend Vitacovir’s video, among several
I’m sad to say that I cannot judge nor help with the Arch wall issue, so I will stay here, just as you, on a more general level.
If something doesn’t work as expected is has two sides: it could be something with the application, or it is something with your expectations. I see many new users coming here expecting FreeCAD to work similar or identical to some other program they know. However, none of those programs is a perfect clone of FreeCAD, and thus behaviour is different.
There are some users who were trained with one of the big professional CAD systems or they were even trainers themselves, but they accepted the tool as it is (drmacro comes to mind or freecad-heini-1), and they make phantastic things with it.
I am getting more and more tired of the argument, that this or that should be done and then FreeCAD will be rewarded with whatever. Sometimes it is more or less the world dominant CAD system, often it is many more developers, always what has to be invested is something the user needs right now and here.
But isn’t it the completely wrong argument? Perhaps exactly those basic things not working attract developers and they are not attracted at all, if everything works perfectly.
