some of you will already have recognized: I work on a detailed architectural model. FreeCAD has quite some nice capabilities for it. Regularly, I meet the following problem. I suppose other do so as well. It is related to subtraction. I explain it with some examples.
- If I want to have a hole for stairs in a floor, I create a Part box and subtract it from the floor structure. In the consequence, this box becomes a child of the floor structure. This is pretty nice, because the only purpose of the box is to make a whole in the floor structure.
- The same holds for some special wholes in the slab for lightning equipment. I create a small Part cylinder and subtract it from the floor structure. The Part cylinder remains as a child within the floor structure.
- In another case, a vertical wall ends at a diagonal wall. Thus the wall end must be diagonal as well. The most simple solution would be to make the vertical wall a bit longer to reach into the diagonal wall and then subtract the diagonal wall from the vertical wall. However, in this case the diagonal wall disappears as an independent wall. This is not what I need.
- A steel column can be within a drywall. Thus I want to have a whole in the drywall for the column. At the moment, I create some additional objects for this subtract operation. It would be simpler to just use the column.
Is there a way (maybe with some Python calls) for the following two issues? I am curious.
- Set for a subtracted object whether it should the child of the minuend or not.
- If the subtrahend and minuend share a same face, this can lead to problems. For this reason, the window subtraction functionality extrudes the subtracted window to go beyond the minuend. Is there already some general functionality for this in FreeCAD.
Thanks for sharing your way of handling these issues.
Simon