3D Sketcher

[chrisb]

It is possible in Draft workbench.

[vanuan]

Hello,

Any news on the capability to do a sketch in 3D instead of 2D ?

Thank you

Constraint solver only available in 2D so far. But you can check out the Assembly subforum.

If you only need non-constrained placement, it is possible.

[SteelFab]

Hello,

as you guys know I'm coding the assembly solver. A little "side effekt" of the resulting solver is the possability of handling 3D sketches. Now as I realy like to have a way to test my code in this respeckt I thought it would be great to have a way to create 3D sketch test cases in FreeCAD, the same way I hacked together a small test assembly module you may remember from my video. But then, maybe 3D sketches is something people want to use so it would be a good idea to implement it the right way. So here the question:

Would anybody be interrested in this functionality? There are not that much use-cases, maybe creating sweep-paths. Anything worth the effort?

Now on the technical side, presuming I would implement it. My thought is to reuse basicly as much as posssible from the existing code. My idea so far is to implement the class sketch3d with the same interface than the current sketch, and then make all other classes template based with the dimension as template parameter. This would allow to slip in the new sketch class to the sketchobject with minimal changes. The same would work for viewprovider sketch and the drawhandlers, however, more adaptions would be needed there. I don't see all implications right now, but that seems the path of least worries.

What do you guys think?

Hello,

I'm a newbie to Freecad, But have had 10+ years in design/modeling using Solidworks. As a practice I would develop a base sketch (A layout) of the entire assembly. Which the components would be mated to, including hardware. Not having this ability in freecad, in my opinion, is a disadvantage. Not just for assemblies but also in the development of surfaces, structural framework and Sheetmetal ... etc..

Adding the ability to sketch in three dimensions would be an awesome addition to the package!

[RatonLaveur]

Are you talking about using a master-sketch/skeleton approach? Because if you are, freecad already allows that and it is even one of the recommended workflows to get a more robust model.