The FreeCAD interface

If you are using Ubuntu or any of its derivatives, the FreeCAD-extras PPA contains most of these addons. On other platforms, any of the addons, including the Parts library, can easily be installed using an addon-installer macro provided in the addons repository. The following procedure shows how to install the addon-installer (other macros can be installed the same way)

Download the addons-installer.FCMacro file from https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-addons by clicking it, then right-clicking the "RAW" button, and choosing "Save as".

Place the macro in your FreeCAD Macros destination path. You FreeCAD Macros destination path is indicated at the bottom of the Execute macro dialog in FreeCAD:

Close and reopen the Execute macro dialog, and start the addons_installer.FCMacro. The installer will launch, from where you can install, update and uninstall any of the addons:

Read more

More download options: http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Download

Detailed installation instructions: http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Installing

FreeCAD PPA for Ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/~freecad-maintainers

FreeCAD addons PPA for Ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/freecad-extras

Compile FreeCAD yourself: http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Compiling

FreeCAD translations: https://crowdin.com/project/freecad

FreeCAD github page: https://github.com/FreeCAD

The FreeCAD interface

FreeCAD uses the Qt framework) to draw and manage its interface. This framework is used in a wide range of applications, so the FreeCAD interface is very classical and presents no particular difficulty to understand. Most buttons are standard and will be found where you expect them (File -> Open, Edit -> Paste, etc). Here is the look of FreeCAD when you open it for the first time, just after installing, showing you the start center:

The start center is a convenient "welcome screen", that shows useful information for newcomers, like the latest files you have been working on, what's new in the FreeCAD world, or quick info about the most common Workbenches. It will also notify you if a new stable version of FreeCAD is available.

Close the Start Page tab (click on the tab x near the bottom) and create a new document (Ctrl-N):

Workbenches

Note that some of the icons have changed between the two screencaptures above. This is where the most important concept used in the FreeCAD interface comes into play: Workbenches.

Workbenches are group of tools (toolbar buttons, menus, and other interface controls) that are grouped together by specialty. Think of a workshop where you have different people working together: A person who works with metal, another with wood. Each of them has, in their workshop, a separate table with specific tools for his/her job. However, they can all work on the same objects. The same happens in FreeCAD.

The most important control of the FreeCAD interface is the Workbench selector, which you use to switch from one Workbench to another:

Workbenches often confuse new users, since it's not always easy to know in which Workbench to look for a specific tool. But they are quick to learn, and after a short while, they will feel natural. New users quickly realize Workbenches are a convenient way to organize the multitude of tools FreeCAD has to offer. In addition, Workbenches are also fully customizable (see below).

Later in this manual, you will find a table showing typical Workbench contents.

The interface

Let's have a better look at the different parts of the interface:

The 3D view is the main component of the interface. It can be undocked out of the main window, you can have several views of the same document (or same objects), or several documents opened at the same time. You can select objects or parts of objects by clicking them, and you can pan, zoom and rotate the view with the mouse buttons. This will be explained further in the next chapter.

The combo view on the left side of the window, has two tabs:

The Model tab shows you the contents and structure of your document (see above) and the properties (or parameters) of the selected object(s) (see below.) These Model Tab properties are separated in two categories:

Data (properties which concern the geometry itself)

View (properties that affect how the geometry looks like on screen).

The Tasks tab is where FreeCAD will prompt you for values specific to the tool you're currently using at the timefor example, entering a 'length' value when the Line tool is being used. It will close automatically after pressing the OK (or Cancel) button. Also, by double-clicking the related object in the combo view, most tools will allow you to reopen that task panel in order to modify the settings.

The report view is normally hidden, but it is a good idea to leave open as it will list any information, warnings or errors to help you decipher (or debug) what you may have done wrong. (View menu -> Panels -> Report View checked)

The Python console is also hidden by default. This is where you can interact with the contents of the document using the Python language. Since every action you do on the FreeCAD interface actually executes a piece of Python code, having this open allows you to watch the code unfold in real timeallowing you a wonderful and easy way to learn a little Python on the way, almost without noticing it. (View menu -> Panels -> Python Console checked)

Any of the panels above can be turned on/off from menu View -> Panels.

Customizing the interface

The interface of FreeCAD is deeply customizable. All panels and toolbars can be moved to different places or stacked one with another. They can also be closed and reopened when needed from the View menu or by right-clicking on an empty area of the interface. There are, however, many more options available, such as creating custom toolbars with tools from any of the Workbenches, or assigning and changing keyboard shortcuts.

These advanced customization options are availabe from the Tools -> Customize menu:

Read more

Getting started with FreeCAD: http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Getting_started

Customizing the interface: http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Interface_Customization

Workbenches: http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Workbenches

More about Python: https://www.python.org

Navigating in the 3D view

A word about the 3D space

If this is your first contact with a 3D application, you will need to grab some concepts first. If not, you can safely skip this section.

The FreeCAD 3D space is an euclidian space. It has an origin point and three axes: X, Y and Z. If you look at your scene from above, conventionally, the X axis points to the right, the Y axis to the back, and the Z axis upwards. In the lower right corner of the FreeCAD view, you can always see from where you are viewing the scene:

Every point of every object that exists in that space can be located by its (x,y,z) coordinates. For example, a point with coordinates (2,3,1) will lie at 2 units on the X axis, 3 units on the Y axis, and 1 unit on the Z axis:

You can look at that scene from any angle, like if you were holding a camera. That camera can be moved left, right, up and down (pan), rotated around what it is looking at (rotate) and brought closer or further from the scene (zoom).

The FreeCAD 3D view

Navigating in the FreeCAD 3D view can be done with a mouse, a Space Navigator device, the keyboard, a touchpad, or a combination of those. FreeCAD can use several navigation modes, which determine how the three basic view manipulation operations (pan, rotate and zoom) are done, as well as how to select objects on the screen. Navigation modes are accessed from the Preferences screen, or directly by right-clicking anywhere on the 3D view:

Each of these modes attributes different mouse buttons, or mouse + keyboard combinations, or mouse gestures, to these four operations. The following table shows the principal available modes:

Mode

Pan

Rotate

Zoom

Select

Inventor

CTRL +

CAD (default)

Blender

SHIFT +

Touchpad

SHIFT +

ALT +

PGUP / PGDOWN

Gesture

+ DRAG

+ DRAG

Alternatively, some keyboard controls are always available, no matter the navigation mode:

CTRL + and CTRL — to zoom in and zoom out

The arrow keys to shift (pan) the view left/right and up/down

the numeric keys, 1 to 6, for the six standard views, top, front, right, bottom, back and left

O will set the camara in orthographic mode,

while P sets it in perspective mode.

CTRL will allow you to select more than one object or element

These controls are also available from the View menu and some from the View toolbar.

Selecting objects

Objects in the 3D view can be selected by clicking them with the corresponding mouse button, depending on the navigation mode. (For the rest of the manual we'll assume the default CAD navigation.) A single click will select the object, and one of its subcomponents (edge, face, vertex). Double-clicking will select the object, and all its subcomponents. You can select more than one subcomponent, or even different subcomponents from different objects, by pressing the CTRL key. With multiple items selected, keeping the CTRL key pressed, and pressing a selected item removes it from the selection. Clicking with the selection button on an empty portion of the 3D view will deselect everything.

A panel called "Selection view", available from the View menu, can also be turned on, which shows you what is currently selected:

You can also use the Selection View to select objects by searching for a particular object.

Read more

The FreeCAD navigation modes: http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Mouse_Model

The FreeCAD document

A FreeCAD document contains all the objects of your scene. It can contain groups and objects made with any workbench. You can therefore switch between workbenches, and still work on the same document and/or objects within that document. The document is what gets saved to disk when you save your work. You can also open several documents at the same time in FreeCAD, and open several views of the same document.

Inside the document, the objects can be moved into groups, and have a unique name. Managing groups, objects and object names is done mainly from the Tree view. There, you can create groups, move objects to groups, delete objects or groups. By right-clicking in the tree view or on an object, you can rename objects, change their color, hide or show them, or possibly other operations, depending on the current workbench.

The objects inside a FreeCAD document can be of different types. Each workbench can add its own types of objects, for example the Mesh Workbench adds mesh objects, the Part Workbench adds Part objects, etc.

There is always one and only one active document. That's the document that appears in the current 3D view, the document you are currently working on. If you switch tabs to another document, that one becomes the active document. Most operations always work on the active document.

FreeCAD documents are saved with the .FcStd extension, which is a zip-based compound format, similar to LibreOffice. If something goes very wrong, it is often possible to unzip it and fix the problem or rescue the data.

Read more

The FreeCAD document: http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=Document_structure

The FcStd file format: http://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=File_Format_FCStd

Parametric objects

FreeCAD is designed for parametric modeling. This means that the geometry that you create, instead of being freely sculptable, is produced by rules and parameters. For example, a cylinder might be produced from a radius and a height. With these two parameters, the program has enough information to build the cylinder.

Parametric objects, in FreeCAD, are in reality small pieces of a program that run whenever one of the parameters has changed. Objects can have a lot of different kinds of parameters: numbers (integers like 1, 2, 3 or floating-point values like 3.1416), real-world sizes (1mm, 2.4m, 4.5ft), (x,y,z) coordinates, text strings ("hello!") or even another object.

This last type allows quickly building complex chains of operations, each new object being based on a previous one, adding new features to it.

In the example below, a solid, cubic object (Pad) is based on a rectangular 2D shape (Sketch) and has an extrusion distance. With these two properties, it produces a solid shape by extruding the base shape by the given distance. You can then use this object as a base for further operations, such as drawing a new 2D shape on one of its faces (Sketch001) and then making a subtraction (Pocket), until arriving at your final object.

All the intermediary operations (2D shapes, pad, pocket, etc) are still there, and you can still change any of their parameters anytime. The whole chain will be rebuilt (recomputed) whenever needed.

Two important things are necessary to know:

Recomputation is not always automatic. Heavy operations, that might modify a big portion of your document, and therefore take some time, are not performed automatically. Instead, the object (and all the objects that depend on it) will be marked for recomputation (a small blue icon appears on them in the tree view). You must then press the recompute button (F5 key or the two blue arrows pointing head to tail) to have all the marked objects recomputed.

The dependency tree must always flow in the same direction. Loops are forbidden. You can have object A which depends on object B which depend on object C. But you cannot have object A which depends on object B which depends on object A. That would be a circular dependency. However, you can have many objects that depend on the same object, for example objects B and C both depend on A. Menu Tools -> Dependency graph shows you a dependency diagram like the image above. It can be useful to detect problems.

Not all objects are parametric in FreeCAD. Often, the geometry that you import from other files won't contain any parameter, and will be simple, non-parametric objects. However, these can often be used as a base, or starting point for newly created parametric objects, depending, of course, on what the parametric object requires and the quality of the imported geometry.

All objects, however, parametric or not, will have a couple of basic parameters, such as a Name, which is unique in the document and cannot be edited, a Label, which is a user-defined name that can be edited, and a placement, which holds its position in the 3D space.