[Discussion Features] Library of Coloured Textured Wall / Furnitures / Floor Finishes / Light ?

[paullee]

@bitacovir is doing a small-house small-house-design-workflow-with-open-source-software-work-in-progress

SH3D is used to do quick conceptual design, which provides -

1. Coloured and texture floor, wall
2. Coloured and texture furnitures
3. Probably default light in each space (wild guess)

Thinking about improvement in Arch / BIM -

1. ArchEquipment may become / double as ArchFurniture which should give a few default options of common furnitures like table, chairs
2. The furnitures may comes from opensource IFC libraries ?
3. Wall may have a few defaulat options like blockwall
4. Probably default light in each ArchSpace
5. Probably ArchSpace can have default / options of floor materials, wall finishes materials ...
6. ArchTexture should works
7. Realthundar's shadow / light should works

Any comments ? Anybody want to implement something like these ?

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[vanuan]

I almost feel the pain
At this point, FreeCAD can't compete with SH3D for interior design

[paullee]

I almost feel the pain
At this point, FreeCAD can't compete with SH3D for interior design

Any idea on possible improvement in relevant worflow ?


I have been trying to search any open source BIM models / parts / furnitures other than NBS (not sure of the license), seems there are a few but not mentioning about the license also.

[vanuan]

Any idea on possible improvement in relevant worflow ?

The title summarizes it pretty well. Besides textures and parts (furniture) library, you need a sophisticated material editor in which you assign textures for both finishes and cuts.

Also TechDraw isn't much of a help. Maybe it should be forked into "ArchDraw". Dimensioning in 3D is not a good experience. It's hard to express 2D concepts in 3D space. You need to make cuts first. But TechDraw doesn't support dimensioning Arch section cuts. So you do some Draft projections. And Draft projections don't know anything about Arch materials. And I'm not even talking about labels, legends, infoboxes. Calculating areas and defining space boundaries is a whole other area of improvement.

I would give up Light and shading completely. And focus on supporting an efficient FreeCAD - Blender workflow.

But those are just random thoughts. I hope that @carlopav will get the Walls right, so that at least you won't deal with Draft lines.

So in order of importance:
1. Structure creation (e.g. wall thickness, joins, outer/inner)
2. Dimensioning
3. Structure materials (wall layers)
4. Cut textures (material hatching and legends)
5. Spaces

And this is just a basic level. Plumbing, ducts, electrical stuff is a must for technical documentation.

Here's a book to get a feeling of what should be supported:
http://homes.ieu.edu.tr/iaed204/Constru ... eriors.pdf

[paullee]

Thanks for the Drawings guidebook - remind me of Frank D. Ching (name correct ?)

And the ideas for improvement, seems good and most fundamental. Hope more peoples can assist to develop, most far beyond my python skill / FC knowledge

The title summarizes it pretty well. Besides textures and parts (furniture) library, you need a sophisticated material editor in which you assign textures for both finishes and cuts.

Agreed

And I'm not even talking about labels, legends, infoboxes. Calculating areas and defining space boundaries is a whole other area of improvement.

Currently it seem Labels, Text are not shown correctly in TechDraw (check my VillaSavoye model or others), maybe just make these shown correctly in TechDraw for the moment before 'ArchDraw' ?

So in order of importance:
1. Structure creation (e.g. wall thickness, joins, outer/inner)
2. Dimensioning
3. Structure materials (wall layers)
4. Cut textures (material hatching and legends)
5. Spaces

Dimensioning is problematic to you as currently you mostly need to do it in 3D 'model space' ?


How about Spaces ? What is your idea ?

Anything you want to attack ?


Thanks.

[vanuan]

Thanks for the Drawings guidebook - remind me of Frank D. Ching (name correct ?)

Not sure I get it. This is a "Construction Drawings and Details for Interiors", some American textbook:

Construction Drawings and Details for Interiors has become a must-have guide for students of interior design. It covers the essentials of traditional and computer-aided drafting with a uniquely design-oriented perspective.

Dimensioning is problematic to you as currently you mostly need to do it in 3D 'model space' ?

First of all, the don't snap. So if you add a dimension and that move a wall, dimension doesn't move with it because it is modeled as a "3D object". Then, the text has orientation, so it must be rotated along the dimension axis to be seen if you change a perspective.

It is also hard to draw dimensions for hidden lines, e.g. if you want the dimension of the wall's core axis rather than its interior/exterior width.

What I call "snapping" here is probably a more global feature, related to assembly and 3D constraint solver. But if we limit this to 2D, it simplifies snapping a lot.

How about Spaces ? What is your idea ?

I think those also need to be done at the floor level, in 2D.

Are you asking how to model spaces? Maybe those can be linked to wall intersections with a level (assuming the wall is not curved or of irregular shape).

So here's a conflict: whether we want FreeCAD to support simple case first (Top-Down approach) or give the user unrestricted access to 3D shapes (Ground-Up approach).

Anything you want to attack ?

Not particularly.

Currently I'm working on understanding the core of FreeCAD - the DocumentObject model. I feel that without solidifying the FreeCAD file format and documenting it I can't reason about the object and its properties. There's a very complex hierarchy of FreeCAD's type system. It really hinders the quality of all the workbenches and scripting work.

It looks like a lot of shortcuts were taken when developing FreeCAD. It needs some ground work.

[paullee]

Thanks for the comments !

[paullee]

It seems there are quite some mesh models in SH3D http://www.sweethome3d.com/freeModels.jsp

Thought not IFC, not sure if / how it can be converted and exported to IFC ?

Any successful workflow done ?


e.g. a plastic chair found there

plastic_chair.obj

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[chrisb]

thomas-niemann works with import and export of meshes and IFC.

ping

[yorik]

Furniture in mesh format is easy to find just anywhere (sketchup's 3d warehouse is by far the best one..). The problem is exactly the same as bitmap vs. vector drawings: vector images are much better, much more easily scalable and modificable, and in most cases much smaller in size, as they contain the "definition" of the image, not the pixels themselves. However, designing/drawing/modelling furniture with vector tools (or shapes, as FreeCAD equivalent) is much slower and needs much more precise modeling than with bitmap/meshes, so it's very uncommon to find.

Mesh furniture can be used in FreeCAD, but it's really a bit unusable for anything else than just sitting in your 3D view...

Two good sources I think, could be used to provide good shape-based furniture: grabcad ( https://grabcad.com/library - search with STEP/IGES filter) and, in the future, Revit repos such as https://www.bimobject.com (they provide IFC files, but these files are almost all meshed ), the day we have a good free util to convert a Revit family to something usable like STEP or SAT (the InventorLoader plugin has a SAT importer). But the opendesign alliance now published a Revit convertor, which is a paid product and way too expensive for FreeCAD, but it means in the future there could be some free tool that uses it, the way it happened with DWG.

Why bimobject is producing crappy IFC files when they have more or less good revit files is beyond me...