- #FREECAD TUTORIAL ASSEMBLY MAC OSX#
- #FREECAD TUTORIAL ASSEMBLY SOFTWARE#
- #FREECAD TUTORIAL ASSEMBLY CODE#
All FreeCAD objects are natively parametric. A wide range of geometric entities, boolean operations and fillets, and built-in support of STEP and IGES formats With native support for concepts like brep, nurbs curves and surfaces.
#FREECAD TUTORIAL ASSEMBLY MAC OSX#
FreeCAD runs exactly the same way on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux platforms. It provided by the Coin 3D library, and a broad Python API. That is a powerful geometry kernel, features an Open Inventor-compliant 3D scene representation model. Or even create macros by recording any particularly useful Python for replay later.įreeCAD is based on OpenCasCade. Freely enter Python commands yourself if you need a little more flexibility. Everything you do within the interface will issue some Python command, which you can examine. And a raytracing module which exports your work for rendering in POV-Ray. A drawing module which exports projected views of your geometry to a 2D SVG document. A as well as various 3D primitives (box, sphere, cylinder, cone, torus), each of which can then be manipulated in various ways (translation, rotation, mirroring, scaling, offset and more). You can also create a new document from scratch.įreeCAD supports 2D objects like lines, rectangles, arcs or circle.
#FREECAD TUTORIAL ASSEMBLY SOFTWARE#
The software can already import DXF, OCA/ GCAD, SVG, STP, STEP, IGS, IGES and other formats. It is 100% Open Source and extremely modular, allowing for very advanced extension and customization. Such as architecture or other engineering specialties. It aimes directly at mechanical engineering and product design but also fits a wider range of uses in engineering. FreeCAD is a general purpose feature-based for CAD, MCAD, CAx, CAE and PLM. It is targeted squarely at the mechanical engineering and product design fields. Take "Part Design" workbench.FreeCAD is a parametric 3D CAD modeler and drawing tool. I would suggest that you go on submenu "Preferences." under the General tab of "Edit" menu and on the "Start up" section select a default workbench to auto load. You have to manually select Workbench menu under View menu. I may say that starting FreeCAD is a bit weird. I have installed the best so far version of FreeCAD, which is 0.14 at the time I am writing this tutorial on Ubuntu. The good thing with FreeCAD is that you can have all those workbenches for free! Some generic workbench like part design for instance will be less expensive than FEM workbench for instance. For a commercial CAD software, a workbench comes with a licence and a cost. A workbench is the equivalent to a bunch of features depending on what you want to achieve. The second concept I should talk about is workbench. When you split your design, you can also consider see many designers in a single company work on the same design. Having a separate wheel and tire under a single assembly rather than having them together inside a single part can have advantages since you may want to try different brands of tires coming from some kind of FreeCAD tire library.
#FREECAD TUTORIAL ASSEMBLY CODE#
The concept is really similar to code reuse once you have a generic piece of code, you can create a library.
Once your got you tire+wheel assembly, you can reuse it as many time as you want to create, for instance, 4 wheels in a mobile robot.
Positioning can be handled by the CAD itself or by a higher level software called PDM (Product Data Manager) or PLM (Product Lifecycle Manager). An assembly is defined as a bunch of parts with relative positioning. However, if you go with 2 parts, you will be interested to have both wheel and tire defined as a single entity: this is an assembly. It really depends on the level of details and flexibility you need in your design. The difference between a part and an assembly is not always clear and depends on your design.Ī tire and its wheel can be designed as two different parts or as a simple one. Part: this is a 3D design of a real world object My objective is to document my learning process as well as to give you enough details to get you started in what seems to be the most logical way to start learning FreeCAD since its workflow seems to be very similar to CATIA.
One more time, I am not an expert of this software. My objective is not to provide you with a detail explanation of every feature of FreeCAD. However, in the emerging world of 3D printing, this is an essential skill any hobbyist should have. I guess CAD can be a little bit intimidating when you are using it for the first time and maybe you don't know where to start.