BIM Workbench

[neophyte1]

I just want to say that I really appreciate the effort that has been expended by the developers of FreeCAD to date. I am starting to work my way through the "Barcelona pavillon" YouTube videos posted by Yorik, and I'm excited to see how far I can extend my knowledge of FreeCAD. I have recently started my own engineering business (if you want to take a look, my website is at kalosergon.org) and am keenly interested in how I can integrate open-source software to do things that would cost thousands of dollars per year via proprietary software.

I do have a few suggestions - requests, really - if you all are interested. First, it seems from what both I and others have experienced, that some basic BIM and Arch functions tend to disappear or become non-functional from time to time in the FreeCAD daily builds. Us newbies discover the missing features when we see features demonstrated in YouTube tutorials and discover that we cannot use these features when we try to follow the tutorials. I am wondering if it might be possible to modify the FreeCAD development flow so that you produce one stable version that has a baseline level of functionality and edit your tutorials to reflect that baseline. Then it might be good to release the daily builds as appimages on their own dedicated page of your freecadweb.org site so that people who have the baseline version installed on their machines can try out the daily builds without having to uninstall the baseline version. As a good starting point, the stable release titled, 2:0.18.4+dfsg1~201911060029~ubuntu18.04.1 might be used to establish a baseline version once it is checked for functionality of all its features. Some of those features, unfortunately, are still broken in the latest stable version. I'd be happy to offer my help in this endeavor. My only problem is that I'm not a programmer and my knowledge of Python is still rather sketchy. But I am trying to learn, and if your development team was willing to tell me what skills they need, I'd be willing to work on developing them as my schedule permits. Thanks again.

[yorik]

We all know and agree with what you say, we all wish stable releases would be more stable, more streamlined, with no bugs or no missing functionality and that the docs would always be complete and up to date.

The problem is that making these things right requires enormous work, not so much programming work, but mostly other things like for example, just to name a few:

- bug triaging and follow-up
- writing and maintaining documentation
- working on, checking and fixing translations
- roadmap tracking and follow-up

It seems trivial but at least 50% of what make things stable are these things. They can be performed also by non-coders BTW

[neophyte1]

We all know and agree with what you say, we all wish stable releases would be more stable, more streamlined, with no bugs or no missing functionality and that the docs would always be complete and up to date.

The problem is that making these things right requires enormous work, not so much programming work, but mostly other things like for example, just to name a few:

- bug triaging and follow-up
- writing and maintaining documentation
- working on, checking and fixing translations
- roadmap tracking and follow-up

It seems trivial but at least 50% of what make things stable are these things. They can be performed also by non-coders BTW

Hello Yorik,
What would I need to do if I wanted to help you with writing and maintaining documentation, or with roadmap tracking and follow-up?

[paullee]

New feature: Curtain walls!

Arch CurtainWall

Screenshot from 2020-04-28 16-26-03.png

Still not perfect, specially for faces where vertical edges are not perpendicular to horizontal edges (need a better subdivision method...) but I think it works pretty good already.

Please test!

Finally found it on
FreeCAD_0.19-20943-Linux-Conda_glibc2.12-x86_64.AppImage

Run on Fedora 31
But it either
- crash or freeze
- click the tool, input 0,0,0 to 10m, 0,0
- then it crash or freeze

[paullee]

If build on a DrafWire, no crash / freeze.

But nothing show up, trying tweaking... nothing

Screenshot from 2020-05-09 02-18-26.png (205.01 KiB) Viewed 2676 times

[yorik]

I've done today some heavy optimization of the BIM workbench so it starts faster. Tell me if you encounter any problem! (some module like coin or QtGui not defined).

I also see that loading Arch or Draft also loads SketcherGui and PartGui at startup, which should be avoided because it makes it load much slower (these modules should be loaded only on first use). Still didn't find where it happens, but this should be changed too

[NightEarth]

Hi yorik,

not sure if it's related to your recent updates as I tried to use your WB for the first time.

I am using Feecad 0.18 (FreeCAD-0.18.4.980bf90-WIN-x64-installer.exe).

On startup of the BIM WB the following error occurs:
Wechsel von Arbeitsbereich fehlgeschlagen: No module named 'ArchIFC'
or
Wechsel von Arbeitsbereich fehlgeschlagen: 'BIMWorkbench' Object has no attribute 'draftingtools'

Best regards,
H

[chrisb]

On startup of the BIM WB the following error occurs:

Hi and welcome to the forum!

I am not familiar with BIM, but I see that much has been done in the 0.19 development cycle. So you may try the latest 0.19 version.

[NightEarth]

Thx for your response, Chris, I will try that ..
Regards, H

[yorik]

The BIM workbench is designed to work with both FreeCAD 0.18 and 0.19. There was a bug there that I now fixed. Please try reinstalling or updating the BIM WB and try again!