The company in which I'm working is testing FreeCAD and ArchiCAD in order to find the best solution for our everyday task which is
Generating land use regulation plans for construction projects for whole industrial/residential areas.
We don't do any design work: We dispose of all ministerial mensuration (geo)data, also the design of the planned constructions are provided by the area developper (mostly in dxf, in rare cases in GML/CityGML/Collada/KML).
These plans that we create contain
- the existing and the planned terrain (prescinded),
- the perimeter for which the regulation will be legally binding
- volumes which represent the (in all 3 dimensions) limiting extension boundary (as part of the regulation) for the planned buildings,
- the planned buildings themselves (prescinded) inclusive the floors,
- surrounding existing buildings (prescinded),
- prescinded/generalized volumes of existing and planned trees,
- street areas,
- areas with vegetation,
- ponds,
- rivers, etc.
The corresponding CityGML level of detail for all elements of the plan is LOD1 or LOD2.
Such a plan is released in the x-y-plan view and in at least two elevation views (sections). The plan contains a carefully chosen symbolism with a respective legend. It contains also labels for the names of the houses and streets, for the base area of the buildings, for the number of trees, and for the extension limits in the z-Axis of the houses.
Up to now, everything is being drawn manually in Microstation. The idea is to make the workflow more effective by automating the sections, the labeling and the legend. We also use GIS in our company (which could provide the automatic legend and labeling, but not the sections).
I'm still new to FreeCAD, but I've seen that the techdraw mode provides automatic section generation of Arch components. I also saw that annotations/labels can be added to a drawing which are always updated after editing the model.
My questions are:
- Is it in the actual version of FreeCAD possible to realize the Arch component "land" out of an ascii point cloud terrain model in order to integrate it into the section?
- Can symbolism and legend creation be realized with the techdraw of FreeCAD?
- Our decision might depend on if FreeCAD will enable LandXML/GML/CityGML integration or not. How is the development going in this regard?