Designing my own new house using FreeCAD

[Szzer]

Resulting in, for example page 1:

Naamloos.png (87.65 KiB) Viewed 3250 times

All other features I add in Inkscape.

[vocx]

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How to choose which objects get a seperate file an which are combined in one is a bit arbitrary. It is also a bit arbitraty because I found the link feature halfway designing the building, so not everything is seperated yet.
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It is good that you investigate this. App Link is fairly new, and the Arch Workbench was not significantly updated to take advantage of it, so we are still testing the best way to integrate it into various workflows.

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2. The default dimensions of the windows and doors are linked, thats stupid...

Internally a Window and a Door are the same object because they essentially behave the same way, they create an opening inside a wall from an extrusion defined by its wires. Here's where we should be more clever and use the object oriented paradigm to derive both objects from a base class, and then treat independently the children classes (window and door) where it makes sense. This probably can be improved, however, since the objects have been in use for a long time, since 2012 or so, refactoring things is a complicated task.

Carlo has been designing new things in the BIM Workbench, both experimental windows and walls have been created from scratch. It's possible this could be integrated into the main code at some point.

[Discussion] A different approach to Arch modelling (Arch Assembly?)

[vocx]

Resulting in, for example page 1:
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Using TechDraw Views is fine. However, with architectural models you can produce already pretty good drawings using TechDraw ArchView. For this you need to use more Arch SectionPlanes, however, currently it seems there is some bug in this tool.

ArchView only shows objects if section plane cuts through them

[Szzer]

Internally a Window and a Door are the same object because they essentially behave the same way, they create an opening inside a wall from an extrusion defined by its wires. Here's where we should be more clever and use the object oriented paradigm to derive both objects from a base class, and then treat independently the children classes (window and door) where it makes sense. This probably can be improved, however, since the objects have been in use for a long time, since 2012 or so, refactoring things is a complicated task.

I was a bit harsh calling it is "stupid", Don't get me wrong. 99% of FreeCAD I like a lot. I just want to point out where some gain in workflow is to be made. And in the case of the Arch workbench this is how windows are handled. I've read that experimenting is going on with combining the Link feature and arch, which I think is a good thing!

Besides a CAD engineer I'm also a Python programmer (Using the PythonOCC wrapper of OpenCascade to automate some of our CAD designs, have sadly not managed to compile freecad myself, nor spend any time on it...). So I've read a bit of the code and saw that the window and door share the same code. From a programming standpoint that makes sense. It would be beneficial to the user if the two functions don't share the same stored input parameters.

Carlo has been designing new things in the BIM Workbench, both experimental windows and walls have been created from scratch. It's possible this could be integrated into the main code at some point.

For designing my own house which in the end will be built, I stayed away from experimental tools. I don't want the model to crash when I install a new 0.19 development version.

Using TechDraw Views is fine. However, with architectural models you can produce already pretty good drawings using TechDraw ArchView. For this you need to use more Arch SectionPlanes, however, currently it seems there is some bug in this tool.

In the past I tried something similar, but at that time it the resulting view did not allow any dimensions to be attached to the lines in Techdraw. This is why I adopted the workflow of combining section view and Shape2DView.

[vocx]

... It would be beneficial to the user if the two functions don't share the same stored input parameters.

Yeah, as I said, this needs to be reorganized or rewritten, but it's pretty complex so we need time.

Compiling FreeCAD in Linux is not that hard. See Compile on Linux.

I haven't used PythonOCC but if I understand correctly, the latest release now works with OCCT 7.4 instead of OCE, so that's good news.

For designing my own house which in the end will be built, I stayed away from experimental tools. I don't want the model to crash when I install a new 0.19 development version.

Yeah, Carlo's tools are in BIM, and they are marked as experimental, so the idea is that more people test them, but they probably aren't ready to replace the current tools. This would also affect the compatibility with older documents, so having them as a parallel alternative is necessary.

...the resulting view did not allow any dimensions to be attached to the lines in Techdraw.

The idea with this workflow is that you add the dimensions to the model in the 3D view itself. You use Draft Dimension, create the objects, and these are included in the Arch SectionPlane and the TechDraw ArchView.

[Szzer]

Compiling FreeCAD in Linux is not that hard. See Compile on Linux.

I use windows.. my main problem is not spending enough effort on getting it to work.

I haven't used PythonOCC but if I understand correctly, the latest release now works with OCCT 7.4 instead of OCE, so that's good news.

PythonOCC is basicly a wrapper of OCCT 7.4 (they switched from OCE last year) with some visualization windows. It is very powerfull since near all functions of OCCT are accessible, making it a challenge to understanding it. I use it to model complex geometries, which take forever to model by hand.

The idea with this workflow is that you add the dimensions to the model in the 3D view itself. You use Draft Dimension, create the objects, and these are included in the Arch SectionPlane and the TechDraw ArchView.

I tried this, but I found the dimensioning in the 3D cumbersome, o well everybody has their own preferences. It is much more stable than dimensioning in Techdraw, I'll give it another try.

[carlopav]

Carlo has been designing new things in the BIM Workbench, both experimental windows and walls have been created from scratch. It's possible this could be integrated into the main code at some point.

For designing my own house which in the end will be built, I stayed away from experimental tools. I don't want the model to crash when I install a new 0.19 development version.

Yes, perfectly undestrand and agree. Anyway, if you have time i'd really appreciate your feedback on them

[vocx]

...It is much more stable than dimensioning in Techdraw, I'll give it another try.

It is more stable because the dimensions are not really tied to the 3D objects. So, you aren't dimensioning particular edges, just two points in space. It may be a bit cumbersome in that regard, but after a while it's not too hard. You don't usually need to change the measurements a lot after a while.

[Szzer]

I've made a repository with the simple version of the house in it.

https://github.com/szzer/House

[saso]

I've made a repository with the simple version of the house in it...

Thank you Szzer for sharing the model, I find it very nice and it is immediately clear that it is coming from a user that is well trained in parametric cad programs as NX, Catia,... I am coming from architecture and programs like AutoCAD, Revit, Archicad, Sketchup,... and most of us get very confused when we first get in contact with such concepts as the history tree, parts and assemblies

I have been however now for a few years researching this concepts of the full parametric cad programs and the possibilities of using it in architecture and buildings constructions. You have actually used a bit of a "hybrid" approach by also using the tools from the ArchWB, where my primary research was in more pure feature based modeling. My first contact with this concepts used in architecture have actually been this series of videos https://www.youtube.com/user/GehryTechn ... /playlists and the models are actually also available here https://www.digitalproject3d.com/downloads.html (at the bottom, Training Materials) but one would need the Digital Project (or maybe also Catia would work) to open them.

One thing that many also don't seem to realize is that when the model is braked up like yours in to several linked files (since FreeCAD also allows it to have everything in one file) then it immediately opens up much better possibilities for a group of users to work on a project (specially if it's larger and more complex), regardless if it is on a local network or over internet with git or in other ways

As for your house, looks nice, I would maybe just review a bit more if the positions of the elements in the upper floor are on the best positions, because of the lower heights from the roof in some areas...