hope your are all fine
I was away from the Forum for quite a while, and I will be away for some more time. But that doesn't mean that I haven't used FreeCAD. I used it nearly every day.
Now I want to show you, what I did in the meantime.
During the last year we planned our single-family house, and now it`s time for the practical stuff. In a few weeks we start to actually build it.
That's why I will be away for some more time.
We got the application plan from our architect. I spent quite a lot of time measuring everything from the plan and 3D Model we got, and modelling it in FreeCAD.
I tried to model it as accurate and detailed as possible.
Afterwards I used a macro to fuse the objects in each level, and created a scaled mesh from it. Exported it to STL and let the 3D Printer do its job.
Now I have a 3D printed house in the scale of 1/200.
The next step was, to get some drawings out of the model. I wanted the whole process to be as simple as possible.
With default FreeCAD tools, one needs to create a section plane, then a tech draw page, tweak some settings there, and some settings there, and export it.
In the end, I created about 25 secion cuts, so this was too much work for a lazy guy like me
At first I wanted to extend the Secion Plane of the Arch Workbench. But there is so much code inside, and so much different ways to export stuff, that this was to complicated for me.
And also backwards compatibility was an issue. As I don't need all the power and options of the default secion plane, I created my own SimpleSectionPlane.
https://github.com/furti/FreeCAD-Toolbo ... n_plane.py
https://github.com/furti/FreeCAD-Toolbo ... enderer.py
The section_vector_renderer is basically the renderer used in the Arch Workbench too. But I did some changes and optimizations.
Most noteworthy changes:
1. The renderer filters all faces, that are in a 90 degree angle to the SectionPlane. This faces will end up as a lot of lines on top of each other in the SVG. For me it makes no sense to have faces rendered, that can't be seen anyways.
2. The renderer gives me a boundbox now, of all the objects rendered. This boundbox is used, to scale and center the whole geometry on the page. So I don't need to place anything
3. It filters all faces that lay on top of each other and where all vertexes match.
Imagine you cut a box. Then the face coplanar to the section plane, and the bottom of the box lay on top of each other in the resulting SVG. But only one of them is visible.
Filtering them out, saves a lot of geometry and reduces SVG Sizes drastically.
4. It can generate different Patterns, based on the Material used. E.g. Insulation has other patterns applied than concrete.
5. It can display markers with text in the plan to hightlight important areas.
After all the optimizations, a SVG generated by my SimpleSectionPlane has only about half the size of a SVG generated by the Arch SectionPlane and TechDraw workbench.
The last step was to create some renderings from the model. I used Blender for it. I mostly did this to get a feeling for different color combinations.
1. I exported the house as stl and imported it in Blender
2. In blender I selected individual faces, that should get the same material, and extracted them to individual objects
3. Applied some materials and image textures to it
4. Added a HDRI texture for the world
5. Rendered some images out
I did this with a pretty old 0.19 Dev version as it worked for me and I was too lazy to update during the whole process
Code: Select all
OS: Windows 10 (10.0)
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.19.18504 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: f66023a646db4b2502bb3637897443b3525ca3c7
Python version: 3.6.8
Qt version: 5.12.1
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 7.3.0
Locale: German/Austria (de_AT)