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I am totally confused. I did most of the Artigas tutorial about 18 months ago, but then had to stop for other things… Coming back, now on version 18, I am trying to model a building we are buying, but my workflow on Freecad must be faulty, and I cannot find a clear summary of good practice or of the way the operations in Freecad actually work.
Not everybody knows what you are talking about. What is “Artigas tutorial”? Is it a webpage, a blog, a video? If you have the resource, you should post the link to it.
FreeCAD has developed pretty fast in the last 2 years. Version 0.17 introduced important changes with respect to 0.16, so you could say 0.16 became obsolete from one day to the next one. Not only that, many experienced users started using 0.18 immediately the day after 0.17 was released, as most changes are updated daily and are fairly stable. Now, 0.18 is finally officially released, but again the main developers and power users are going to be using the 0.19 development version from now on. My advice to you is to look for resources for the 0.17 and 0.18 versions, and don’t pay too much attention to resources that are older than that. In the FreeCAD timeline, information that is 18 months old may be too old. Some information from 0.16 is still valid, but many things that describe PartDesign have changed, so you should focus on 0.17 onwards.
As I understood it the workflow should be:
Workflow for what? Not everybody uses FreeCAD for the same objective. Some import DXFs, others just build their geometry from scratch. Importing DXF is helpful if you want to build an architectural plan. Is this your objective?
- import the dxf
- use Sketcher to copy a line representing one face of a wall.
This entails anchoring the endpoints to lines on the base drawing, after activation external geometry.
- switch to Arch workbench to generate the wall. Edit its data to suit.
The Arch Workbench works much better if you use base 2D geometry from the Draft Workbench, as Arch imports all tools from Draft, and basically works on top of it.
- highlight a face of a wall and switch back to Sketcher to draw the outline of an opening on the wall face.
- switch to Part design in order to have access to “pad” and “pocket” tools, use pocket to cut the hole.
This leads to having to create a “Body”. I do not understand the relationship between the body, the
wall and the sketch. Sometimes it works.
- repeat the above as needed. Join walls using Arch add, but better not to do so until all openings have
been made, as drawing on the correct face of the correct wall becomes tricky.
It is a bad idea to mix PartDesign Workbench objects with Arch Walls if you are a beginner and don’t know what you are doing. Stick to using Draft objects and Arch objects. You don’t have to use PartDesign Pocket to create openings in Walls; create a simple Part Box (from the Part Workbench), and subtract that if you must. If you use PartDesign, you must subtract an entire “Body” (PartDesign Body) from a Wall, not the individual features (Pad, Pocket, Fillet, etc.).
If your intention is to create Windows and Doors, Arch provides a more convenient mechanism, the Arch Window tool, which creates the appropriate Window or Door shape, and automatically makes a hole in your Wall for it.
…
1- The tree view becomes really confusing, and my attempts to rationalize it by grouping, say, walls under a
separate group results in many items being duplicated or linked to. I guess it must be important to place
the cursor at the bottom of the list before beginning any new item, to avoid things becoming children of
unrelated items.
There are some quirks with the way the Tree view works, and they may not be entirely intuitive. Creating Arch objects is usually very simple. Select a base object, for example, a Draft Wire, and then hit Arch Wall. The wall is created, and the wire is immediately placed “inside” the Wall. Then you can move the Wall inside a Group (Std Group); if you need to modify the Wall, modify the base wire, and refresh the model to see the changes.
However, the very same wire can also be used with another tool, for example, Arch Structure. This means that the same base shape can appear inside different objects and groups. Depending on the order in which you create the elements, these objects may appear messy in the tree view.
If you see too much clutter I suggest this, drag the elements to the root node in the tree, the one that with the name of the file, “Unnamed” by default. When you drag and drop an object there, it will often clean up some objects that appear inside others. Then you can move them to groups.
2- Trying to cut a hole in a wall and getting this error:
" In order to use this feature it needs to belong to a part object in the document."
I do not understand what is a part object or which document is intended.
Don’t mix PartDesign with Walls. It sounds like you are trying to use Pocket with a Wall. It won’t work. Pocket, Pad, Hole, etc., only work within the same “Body”. A Body is a single contiguous shape. For example, a gear is a solid “Body”; it can be built from a sketch, a pad, and then different holes, subtractions, and fillets. PartDesign is meant to build solid mechanical shapes like that, not architectural walls.
3- Trying to draw in Sketcher on a wall surface can be extremely difficult as the screen becomes covered
in a grey mist caused by Freecad trying to draw a 1cm grid, even if the grid is defined as 1m. Also,
the base drawing becomes invisible behind the base of the wall and any adjacent floor slabs, meaning
it is nearly impossible to snap to lines or points to create construction lines. There is also no indication
when construction mode or modem mode is active, so lines have to converted.
Don’t use the Sketcher Workbench with Walls. Use Draft with Arch. Arch already includes Draft, so use those tools. Draft includes the Draft Snap system which allows you to create grids and workplanes, co-planar with any existing Wall, so you can correctly constrain and position your wires.
Arch does use Sketches as the base shape of Arch Windows and Doors, but the usage is simple. Just click the Arch Window button instead of drawing the shape yourself.
4- Sometimes, for no apparent reason, all the base drawing lines are non-snappable - the cursor shows a
no-parking sign.
I don’t really understand this.
5- Highlighting an item, a sketch for example in the project tree, sometimes causes it to appear highlighted
in the view, but sometimes not.
Sketches will be visible if they are visible, and their Body is also visible.
6- Constraints: It is not possible to identify which constraint says what. There can be five coincident
point constraints listed, but I cannot tell which one I need to delete to resolve a problem. Sometimes
they do not disappear when deleted.
It’s difficult to tell what is going on here without an example or pictures.
Follow the tutorials. They are meant to introduce you to the best practices of creating architectural drawings.
- Tutorial for open windows: I suggest this as a very basic introduction.
- Manual:BIM modeling: another simple tutorial with fairly simple basic wires.
- Arch tutorial: this long tutorial is the primary document that showcases the Arch workbench, making use of many of its tools. It is extensive, but may be too complex for beginners. It was made in FreeCAD 0.14, but it still works pretty much the same now, as the Arch and Draft tools haven’t changed much since. The only issue is that the Drawing Workbench to produce floor plans is no longer supported. You should use the TechDraw Workbench as described in the first two tutorials.