New Freecad / experienced Revit user questions and workflows on starting out

[bitacovir]

please. You must explain the steps of your process. Also, you could share your file.

[yorik]

The levels manager indeed needs some overdue rework too. Long time I didn't use those tools actually...
I think we could take the opportunity and merge it with the levels window you were asking about. One easy, relocatable window that you can leave somewhere, that would allow you to quickly manipulate levels...

I'll be out of home most of this week, but will try to give this a shoot right after

[Kunda1]

@yorik should we open a ticket ?

[dimitar]

please. You must explain the steps of your process. Also, you could share your file.

It seems that it may be a compatibility issue with the AMD GPU and Freecad on my workstation at work, as it works fine on my home laptop


@yorik, sounds good, I've subscribed to your patreon page, as will be happpy to contribute in any way i can

This weekend, I invested a lot of time into learning Freecad, and it is very powerful, with a lot of potential for the BIM community.

By the way, I have been thinking for a long while about open source software in the center of an architectural workflow - imagine the fees that go for licensing software these days and the in-house development teams to actually go to a software that everyone can benefit from. I wrote more about the topic on linkedin here - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/open-sou ... ouchnikov/.

From this weekend's experience, Freecad seems to hit all the possibilities I am looking for, of course with some requirement for further improvement on the UI/tools side (how many active devs does Freecad have?). I will be recording my process proper, but here are some screenshots of my process for the theatre

Some notes:
- All the levels are connected to the worksheet.
- The elevator doors to quite a bit to get right. The placement uses expressions, but I found it very tedious to enter the expression per each cloned copy, so I wrote a very simple little script.
- The walls are almost all based on sketches. I find sketches more useful than drafting lines because as far as I can tell thus far, the only way to set up a parametric geometrical relationships is through sketches. Curious about your wall workflows?
- Let's talk about sketches - I love them! When I was at a Catia workshop, I was thinking how amazing parametric constraints are, and they work exactly in the same manner here.

Quirks.

I will be posting behaviors that I find odd, as i get more familiar with the program. Keep in mind that some of them could be purely because I haven't learned the best way to achieve a given task Freecad. I'm always open for comments if there are better ways to do things.

- Placing the elevators from the Part library was a true pain. It didn't work as expected at all and after numerous tries, I loaded the elevators doors through the object library, cloned them, positioned them next to the wall, and manually selected a host.
- I like the behavior of being able to adjust the properties of multiple selected objects. However, I am not sure why property expressions can only be entered for one object at at time. While, I feel fairly comfortable doing light scripts, the average BIM user, would be daunted by the idea of scripting something as simple as making sure that doors are aligned. ( i do wonder if there is a way to create a construction line and snap the doors to it somehow?)
- Visibility workflows - I generally use a similar approach in all programs i work in - toggle often between isolated selection and the last visible state. I wish there was a way to create a similar behavior in Freecad. I did look at some macros available in the addon manager and a few other threads on this forum, but all solutions i've found fee quite buggy. Along with this, it would be nice to have visibility selections in a menu, where one can easily save a preset of visible items, to be able to quickly recall later. I was also trying to find a way to assign a hotkey to "go to selection" but I couldn't find it in the customize menu. I frequently find a need to isolated two elements = e.g. the current sketch that I am working on, and a reference sketch, but find no good way of doing this at the moment
- Wall. This is another quite big pain. Sketcher seems the most natural way for me to do wall, at it feels the most precise at the moment. However,there are a few quirks - It seems that if i have intersections between lines within a sketch, Freecad creates voids. (i've posted another in this thread about this behavior earlieron) Also, in a sketch, where all the walls are one object, I've found that doors create voids through more than the wall section at which they are placed. Manually adjusting doors' hole depth did not produce any voids in the hosted wall. Suggestions for other approaches to doing walls are quite welcome
- Moving hosted element, moves the host wall, if the wall's "move with host" property is set to true. As mentioned in another post, this is quite quirky, as It feels like the relationship is inverse to what it should be
- 2d Graphics and sheets - placing a section cut on a page feels very limited in terms of graphics. This is one of the few areas where I like revit's approach of being able to customise colors. I haven't explored much, but placing a section on a sheet, I wish there was a way to specifiy more visibility settings with a section on a page - like shadows, far clip, more granular control of lineweights, automatic levels placement, etc.
- I've also had some odd behaviors when cloning elements with a small macro script, but I will post on that later.
- Stairs. I know how difficult this topic is. And read @paullee's posts on stairs. From my own experience, I know that generally no bim software gets a stairs tool right. However, I couldn't even do the basics. For example, a polyline does not get drawn as a stair. And if change the shape of a stair, the railing's don't follow. I wish there were more presets for stair styles as well. I have a colleague that works with Archicad, and he seems very happy with the stair tool that they use there. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to test it. I feel that stairs is probably the topic through which I will test how well Blender can be used with Freecad.

Next, I will be looking at the possibilities of creating curtain walls, interoperability with Blender and Rhino, and the typical Revit exercise of importing a mass from Rhino, creating some levels, and generating automatic floors from the specified levels. Any suggestions on any of these workflows will be very welcome.

[dimitar]

Visibility/graphics quirk - any idea why the flat lines shaded style looks so screwy?

[paullee]

- Stairs. I know how difficult this topic is. And read @paullee's posts on stairs. From my own experience, I know that generally no bim software gets a stairs tool right. However, I couldn't even do the basics. For example, a polyline does not get drawn as a stair. And if change the shape of a stair, the railing's don't follow. I wish there were more presets for stair styles as well. I have a colleague that works with Archicad, and he seems very happy with the stair tool that they use there. Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to test it. I feel that stairs is probably the topic through which I will test how well Blender can be used with Freecad.

Enjoy reading the discussion and would very much like to discuss about finding an efficient general design devlopment workflow, Wall om Sketch, Curtain Wall etc:) Before that, maybe Stairs first.

You may describe what do you expect from the polyline, see if the anything can be done to make it.intuitive - here or in the ArchStairs thread.

@yorik let me to carry out 'experiments' though …
- I have only a few months informal reading on python
- not trained as programmer
- not used Revit, ArchiCAD, etc
- have not updated the FC Stairs wiki
So bear with the quality of my 'additions' to York's original code

BTW, railing is something which I have not found a good way forward, all suggestion welcome, or interested in developing the code ?

( You may need to recompute the model to make the railing update - anyway it is far from really usable)

[dimitar]

Enjoy reading the discussion and would very much like to discuss about finding an efficient general design devlopment workflow, Wall om Sketch, Curtain Wall etc:) Before that, maybe Stairs first.

You may describe what do you expect from the polyline, see if the anything can be done to make it.intuitive - here or in the ArchStairs thread.

Thanks for your input. What I would like to do at some point is record or find small videos of how Revit, Archicad, VisualARQ (BIM plugin for Rhino), BricsCAD, and Catia Concept Designer Module do stairts, curtain wall, railing etc.

BTW, railing is something which I have not found a good way forward, all suggestion welcome, or interested in developing the code ?

( You may need to recompute the model to make the railing update - anyway it is far from really usable)

The way I typically do railing in Grasshopper is by creating a module of verticals or horizontals and then arraying that module onto a curve. If the railing is for a stair, then it should inherit some properties of the stair (e.g stretch the module to either a whole stair run or to individual steps.

Another little quirk that I've discoved -There is no way to tell in the outliner whether an object's selectability has been turned off. Also, there should perhaps be an option to snap to non-selectable items in the viewport

[Kunda1]

Thanks for your input. What I would like to do at some point is record or find small videos of how Revit, Archicad, VisualARQ (BIM plugin for Rhino), BricsCAD, and Catia Concept Designer Module do stairts, curtain wall, railing etc.

Maybe @Celica_Supra who is Joko Engineerin on youtube would be interested in this idea?

[paullee]

However, I couldn't even do the basics. For example, a polyline does not get drawn as a stair.

Thanks, so you get how Stairs works? Any problem still?

[dimitar]

Thanks, so you get how Stairs works? Any problem still?

Yes, i am still having problems. Simple stairs are find, but anything on a polyline, and no matter how many risers i request, it only shows me a flat surface.

FreeCAD_fH8jkD3WuG.png (53.72 KiB) Viewed 1836 times

Now more on my test project. I've placed all cores, core doors, and starting placing structure. This is what the project looks like now

FreeCAD_sdhGIIMpZR.png (63.74 KiB) Viewed 1836 times

I then exported it to blender, and did a quick stair and facade studies.

blender_qjr6DHJ8Cj.png (365.48 KiB) Viewed 1836 times

blender_v3YFomeICw.png (309.38 KiB) Viewed 1836 times