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

[paullee]

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

Great model!

In the meantime, there is a very brief summary and example model in post below on how currently Stairs:-

https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 20#p243014


See if it make sense to you and suggestion welcome.

[dimitar]

Here's another update, which I have also posted with what I've mentioned in this forum: linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/ur ... 5914117120

freecad01.gif (745.93 KiB) Viewed 2128 times

[bitacovir]

(how many active devs does Freecad have?).

You can find that information in the FreeCAD repository in github. For architecture field, Yorik is the main active developer for ArchWB, DraftWB and BIMWB (and IFC expert). But there are other people who make small contributions in these Workbenches, too. Anyway, the development of FreeCAD workbenches for Arch and BIM has been significant in the las 3 years. Your feedback is valuable because the FreeCAD users are fron mechanical design mainly. We lack of users from Architecture or BIM industry to test FreeCAD.

[carlopav]

Very nice model indeed!

[dimitar]

We lack of users from Architecture or BIM industry to test FreeCAD.

Yes, I am kind of feeling a calling to promote the usability of Freecad as a BIM tool to draw more attention to the tool and hopefully more developers, where my position in a big architectural company could possibly help of drawing attention from some of the internal dev teams at architecture firms (definitely as a start inside of my company, HOK).

I had a chat with Pablo Vasquez from the Blender institute at a conference in London in which I was presenting and he gave some good tips about promotion - exploit the possible link with Blender to draw in audience from that community and test it doing "real" project, as they do real movies with Blender and Godot will be doing an video-game. I know Yorik uses it professionally and probably others out there (?), which is great. I will continue to develop this theatre model further.

I also will be testing specific workflows and IFC interoperability with Revit to potentially show some immediate use cases in which Revit's rigid approach to BIM produces limited results (floors and walls from a mass, facade/curtain walls, complex structure).

Would also be happy to look into collaborating on test projects / specific workflows with other members of the community.

[paullee]

Would also be happy to look into collaborating on test projects / specific workflows with other members of the community.

I have been thinking for a while if there are some Architects around, a FC design team may be formed say to work on a hypothetical project, building library of parts (like AutoCAD blocks - I was only a ACAD user ), competition etc.


BTW, noted you have a theatre in your model, wonder how do you do it ... happens I am experimenting use ArchStair to build a simple theatre prototype, comments welcome.
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 40#p314983

[bitacovir]

I had a chat with Pablo Vasquez from the Blender institute at a conference in London in which I was presenting and he gave some good tips about promotion - exploit the possible link with Blender to draw in audience from that community and test it doing "real" project, as they do real movies with Blender and Godot will be doing an video-game. I know Yorik uses it professionally and probably others out there (?), which is great.

Watch this youtube channel.
https://m.youtube.com/user/RegisBBNT

[yorik]

Amazing model @dimitar !

I also think having more arch-oriented users is definitely doing a lot of good. Recently there has been a big raising in attention that FreeCAD receives from architects, and the activity we see in this forum section shows it well. Also, it reflects well in the quantity of pull requests targeted at Arch/BIM. Many people here have started contributing actively to the code (moult, carlopav, paullee, etc)

I also think FreeCAD has entered a kind of "second phase", where the geometry "core" is becoming pretty stable, and we are taking care more and more of all these small "usability" issues. Probably these will make a huge difference in adoption by a larger public too.

Of the "big problems" I see of using FreeCAD for BIM (working with large files and producing 2D drawings, basically), the first one is in large part solved by working with Arch References (we still need to make IFC import faster), and the second one I still have no clear idea how to best solve, it needs more testing...

But definitely it now happens to me all the time that Revit falls short when trying to model something a bit more complex or custom, while doing it in FreeCAD becomes increasingly convenient and practical and fast. Only FreeCAD is still not as good as Revit to produce the final drawings, but you can increasingly "insert" FreeCAD into a Revit-based workflow (model some parts, keep them as FreeCAD files, produce IFC files early, fix possible defects, update IFC files, keep the IFC files linked in Revit, etc). Hopefully we can increase the FreeCAD part a lot (until taking over? ) but in any case I think this is the right way to "adopt" free software, doing it progressively

[bitacovir]

Of the "big problems" I see of using FreeCAD for BIM (working with large files and producing 2D drawings, basically), the first one is in large part solved by working with Arch References (we still need to make IFC import faster), and the second one I still have no clear idea how to best solve, it needs more testing...

For the Architecture Industry, to produce so many drawings sheets of a single project can be a difficult challenge for FreeCAD (I am thinking in TechDraw WB).
Maybe an interesting approach is to think in metadata rather than graphics render on drawing sheets. Some kind of metadata system that FreCAD could storage and produce uncountable automatic technical reports when is required.

[Moult]

Just wanted to drop in and say I'm really enjoying this thread and good to see another with a strong architecture background on board. FreeCAD has a ton of potential and attempts like yours to help push it there are exactly what it needs right now.