The FreeCAD interface

Table of Contents

Introduction

Discovering FreeCAD

What is FreeCAD?

Installing

The FreeCAD interface

Navigating in the 3D view

The FreeCAD document

Parametric objects

Import and export to other filetypes

Working with FreeCAD

All workbenches at a glance

Traditional modeling, the CSG way

Traditional 2D drafting

Modeling for product design

Preparing models for 3D printing

Generating 2D drawings

BIM modeling

Using spreadsheets

Creating FEM analyses

Creating renderings

Python scripting

A gentle introduction

Creating and manipulating geometry

Creating parametric objects

Creating interface tools

The community

Table of Contents

Introduction 1.1

Discovering FreeCAD 1.2

What is FreeCAD? 1.2.1

Installing 1.2.2

Installing on Windows 1.2.2.1

Installing on Linux 1.2.2.2

Installing on Mac OS 1.2.2.3

Uninstalling 1.2.2.4

Setting basic preferences 1.2.2.5

Installing additional content 1.2.2.6

The FreeCAD interface 1.2.3

Workbenches 1.2.3.1

The interface 1.2.3.2

Customizing the interface 1.2.3.3

Navigating in the 3D view 1.2.4

A word about the 3D space 1.2.4.1

The FreeCAD 3D view 1.2.4.2

Selecting objects 1.2.4.3

The FreeCAD document 1.2.5

Parametric objects 1.2.6

Import and export to other filetypes 1.2.7

Working with FreeCAD 1.3

All workbenches at a glance 1.3.1

Traditional modeling, the CSG way 1.3.2

Traditional 2D drafting 1.3.3

Modeling for product design 1.3.4

Preparing models for 3D printing 1.3.5

Exporting to slicers 1.3.5.1

Converting objects to meshes 1.3.5.2

Using Slic3r 1.3.5.3

Using the Cura addon 1.3.5.4

Generating G-code 1.3.5.5

Generating 2D drawings 1.3.6

BIM modeling 1.3.7

Using spreadsheets 1.3.8

Reading properties 1.3.8.1

Writing properties 1.3.8.2

Creating FEM analyses 1.3.9

Creating renderings 1.3.10

Python scripting 1.4

A gentle introduction 1.4.1

Writing Python code 1.4.1.1

Manipulating FreeCAD objects 1.4.1.2

Vectors and Placements 1.4.1.3

Creating and manipulating geometry 1.4.2

Creating parametric objects 1.4.3

Creating interface tools 1.4.4

The community 1.5

A FreeCAD manual

Note: The manual has been moved to the official FreeCAD wiki which is now its new home. If you wish to propose edits, please do them there, as this repository will be kept only for generating the ebook versions and will not be directly edited anymore.

Introduction

FreeCAD is a free, open-source parametric 3D modeling application. It is made primarily to model real-world objects, ranging from the small electronic components up to buildings and civil engineering projects, with a strong focus on 3D-printable objects. FreeCAD is free to download, use, distribute and modify, and its source code is open and published under the very permissive LGPL license. The data you produce with FreeCAD is fully yours, and can be recovered without FreeCAD.

FreeCAD is also fundamentally a social project, as it is developed and maintained by a community of developers and users united by their passion for FreeCAD.

This manual is an experiment at taking the opposite way from the official FreeCAD documentation wiki. The wiki is written collaboratively by dozens of community members and, like most wikis, it contains huge amounts of information, but is very hard to access and navigate by newcomers. This makes it a precious resource for reference, but not a very practical tool to learn FreeCAD. This manual will walk you through the same information available on the wiki. However, we hope that the more step-by-step pace, based on examples, and the more unified tone given by a smaller number of authors, will make it more suitable for a first contact with FreeCAD, and that it will become a perfect companion for the wiki.

This manual has been written for the current stable version of FreeCAD which is version 0.16.

All the contents of this manual are published under the Creative Commons 4.0 license, and can be freely used, downloaded, copied, and modified. The source files of this manual are hosted on github.

This book has been written mostly by Yorik, but using a lot of information built by FreeCAD users, mostly from the FreeCAD wiki. The real author of this book is actually the whole FreeCAD community!

Discovering FreeCAD

What is FreeCAD?

FreeCAD is an open-source parametric 3D modeling application, made primarily to design real-life objects. Parametric modeling describes a certain type of modeling, where the shape of the 3D objects you design are controlled by parameters. For example, the shape of a brick might be controlled by three parameters: height, width and length. In FreeCAD, as in other parametric modelers, these parameters are part of the object, and stay modifiable at any time, after the object has been created. Some objects can have other objects as parameters, for example you could have an object that takes our brick as input, and creates a column from it. You could think of a parametric object as a small program that creates geometry from parameters.

FreeCAD is not designed for a particular kind of work, or to make a certain kind of objects. Instead, it allows a wide range of uses, and permits users to produce models of all sizes and purposes, from small electronic components to 3D-printable pieces and all the way up to buildings. Each of these tasks have different dedicated sets of tools and workflows available.

FreeCAD is also multiplatform (it runs exactly the same way on Windows, Mac OS and Linux platforms), and it is open-source. Being open-source, FreeCAD benefits from the contributions and efforts of a large community of programmers, enthusiasts and users worldwide. FreeCAD is essentially an application built by the people who use it, instead of being made by a company trying to sell you a product. And of course, it also means that FreeCAD is free, not only to use, but also to distribute, copy, modify, or even sell.

FreeCAD also benefits from the huge, accumulated experience of the open-source world. In its bowels, it includes several other open source components, as FreeCAD itself can be used as a component in other applications. It also possesses all kinds of features that have become a standard in the open-source world, such as supporting a wide range of file formats, being hugely scriptable, customizable and modifiable. All made possible through a dynamic and enthusiast community of users.

The official website of FreeCAD is at http://www.freecadweb.org

Read more:

About FreeCAD: http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=About_FreeCAD

List of features: http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Feature_list

Screenshots and user cases: http://forum.freecadweb.org/viewforum.php?f=24

Installing

FreeCAD uses the LGPL license, which means you are free to download, install, redistribute and use FreeCAD the way you want, regardless of the type of work you'll do with it (commercial or non-commercial). You are not bound to any clause or restriction, and the files you produce with it are fully yours. The only thing that the license prohibits, really, is to claim that you programmed FreeCAD yourself!

FreeCAD runs without any difference on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. However, the ways to install it differ slightly depending on your platform. On Windows and Mac, the FreeCAD community provides precompiled packages (installers) ready to download, while on Linux, the source code is made available to Linux distributions maintainers, who are then responsible for packaging FreeCAD for their specific distribution. As a result, on Linux, you can usually install FreeCAD right from the software manager application.

The official FreeCAD download page for Windows and Mac OS is https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/releases

FreeCAD versions

The official releases of FreeCAD, on the page above or in your distribution's software manager, are stable versions. However, the development of FreeCAD is fast! New features and bug fixes are added almost every single day. Since it can sometimes take a long time between stable releases, you might be interested in trying a more bleeding-edge version of FreeCAD. These development versions, or pre-releases, are uploaded from time to time to the download page mentioned above, or, if you are using Ubuntu, the FreeCAD community also maintains PPA (Personal Package Archives) or 'daily builds' which are regularly updated with the most recent changes.

If you are installing FreeCAD in a virtual machine, please be aware that the performance might be low, or in some cases unusable due to the limits of OpenGL support on most virtual machines.

Installing on Windows

Download an installer (.exe) package corresponding to your version of Windows (32bit or 64bit) from the download page. The FreeCAD installers should work on any windows version starting from Windows 7.

Double-click the downloaded installer.

Accept the terms of the LGPL license (this will be one of the few cases where you can really, safely click the "accept" button without reading the text. No hidden clauses):

You can leave the default path here, or change if you wish:

No need to set the PYTHONPATH variable, unless you plan to do some advanced python programming, in which case you probably already know what this is for:

During the installation, a couple of additional components, which are bundled inside the installer, will be installed too:

That's it, FreeCAD is installed. You will find it in your start menu.

Installing a development version

Packaging FreeCAD and creating an installer takes some time and dedication, so usually, development (also called pre-release) versions are provided as .zip (or .7z) archives. These don't need to be installed, just unpack them and lauch FreeCAD by double-clicking the FreeCAD.exe file that you will find inside. This also allows you to keep both the stable and "unstable" versions together on the same computer.

Installing on Linux

On most modern Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, Mint, Elementary, etc), FreeCAD can be installed with the click of a button, directly from the software management application provided by your distribution (the aspect of it can differ from the images below, each distribution uses its own tool).

Open the software manager and search for "freecad":

Click the "install" button and that's it, FreeCAD gets installed. Don't forget to rate it afterwards!

Alternative ways

One of the big joys of using Linux is the multitude of possibilities to tailor your software, so don't restrain yourself. On Ubuntu and derivatives, FreeCAD can also be installed from a PPA maintained by the FreeCAD community (it contains both stable and development versions) and since this is open-source software, you can also easily compile FreeCAD yourself.

Installing on Mac OS

Installing FreeCAD on Mac OSX is nowadays as easy as on other platforms. However, since there are less people in the community who own a Mac, the available packages often lag a couple of versions behind the other platforms.

Download a zipped package corresponding to your version from the download page.

Open the Downloads folder, and expand the downloaded zip file:

Drag the FreeCAD application from inside the zip to the Applications folder:

That's it, FreeCAD is installed!

If the system prevents FreeCAD to launch, due to restricted permissions for applications not coming from the App store, you will need to enable it in the system settings:

Uninstalling

Hopefully you won't want to do that, but it is good to know anyway. On Windows and Linux, uninstalling FreeCAD is very straightforward. Use the standard "remove software" option found in the control panel on Windows, or remove it with the same software manager you used to install FreeCAD on Linux. On Mac, all you need to do is remove it from the Applications folder.

Setting basic preferences

Once FreeCAD is installed, you might want to open it and set a couple of preferences. Preferences settings in FreeCAD are located under menu Edit -> Preferences. You can browse through the different pages to see if there is anything else you would want to change, but here are a couple of basic ones:

Language: FreeCAD will automatically pick the language of your operating system, but you might want to change that. FreeCAD is almost fully translated to 5 or 6 languages, plus many others that are at the moment only partially translated. You can easily help to translate FreeCAD.

Auto-load module: Normally, FreeCAD will start showing you the start center page. You can skip this and begin a FreeCAD session directly in the workbench of your choice. Workbenches will be explained in detail in the next chapter.

Create document at startup: Combined with the option above, this starts FreeCAD ready for work.

Storage options: As any complex application, FreeCAD might crash from time to time. Here you can configure a few options that will help you to recover your work in case of a crash.

Authoring and license: You can set the default settings that will be used for your new files. Consider making your files shareable right from the start, by using a friendlier, copyleft license like Creative Commons.

Redirect python messages to output view: These two options are always good to mark, as they will permit you to see what's wrong in the Report View when there's a problem with running a particular python script.

Units: Here you can set the default units you wish to use. It will be easier working the examples later, to stay in MKS.

Installing additional content

As the FreeCAD project and its community grows quickly, and also because it is easy to extend, external contributions and side-projects made by community members and other enthusiasts begin to appear everywhere on the internet. There is an effort going on to gather all these interesting additions in one place, on the FreeCAD github page. There, among other things, you will find:

A Parts library, which contains all kinds of useful models, or pieces of models, created by FreeCAD users that can be freely used in your projects. The library can be used and accessed right from inside your FreeCAD installation.

A collection of addons, most of them additional workbenches, that extend the functionality of FreeCAD for certain tasks. Instructions for installing are given on each separate addon page.

A collection of macros, which are also available on the FreeCAD wiki along with documentation about how to use them. The wiki contains many more macros.