After more than a year of development, the release of FreeCAD 3, an open parametric 0.20D modeling system, has been published, which is distinguished by flexible customization and functionality enhancements through the connection of add-ons. The interface is built using the Qt library. Add-ons can be created in Python. Supports saving and loading models in various formats, including STEP, IGES and STL. The FreeCAD code is distributed under the LGPLv2 license, Open CASCADE is used as a modeling engine. Ready assemblies will soon be prepared for Linux (AppImage), macOS and Windows.
FreeCAD allows you to change the parameters of the model, play with different design options and evaluate the work at various points in the development of the model. The project can be a free replacement for commercial CAD systems such as CATIA, Solid Edge, and SolidWorks. While FreeCAD's main purpose is mechanical engineering and new product design, it can be used in other areas such as architectural design.
The main innovations of FreeCAD 0.20:
- The help system has been completely rewritten, which is moved to a separate Help add-on and displays information directly from the project's Wiki.
- In the user interface, the Navigation Cube has been redesigned, in which faces have appeared to rotate the 3D view by 45%. Added a mode for automatically rotating the 3D view to the nearest logical position when clicking on a face. The settings provide the ability to change the size of the Navigation Cube.
- Added the display of the common and internal command name to tooltips to make it easier to find information in the help section and the Wiki.
- A new Std UserEditMode command has been added to select the editing mode used when double-clicking on an object in the element tree.
- In the context menu shown in the element tree, it became possible to add objects dependent on them to the selected objects.
- A new Section Cut tool has been implemented to obtain non-hollow and constant sections of parts and assemblies.
- Added two new mouse navigation styles based on OpenSCAD and TinkerCAD navigation.
- The settings provide the ability to change the size of the coordinate system for the 3D view.
- Support for automatically loading selected workspaces during FreeCAD startup has been added to the workspace settings panel.
- On the Linux platform, a transition has been made to use directories defined in the XDG specification for storing settings, data, and cache ($HOME/.config/FreeCAD, $HOME/.local/share/FreeCAD and $HOME/.cache/FreeCAD instead of $HOME /.FreeCAD and /tmp).
- A new type of add-on has been added - Preference Packs, through which you can distribute sets of settings from user configuration files (user.cfg), for example, one user can share his settings with another. You can also distribute themes in customization packages by adding Qt stylesheets.
- The add-ons manager has implemented support for distributing settings packages, added displaying information from add-on metadata, improved support for add-ons, the code of which is located in third-party git repositories, expanded options for searching for add-ons and filtering the output.
- Extended capabilities of the architectural design environment (Arch). Added the ability to parametrically place windows and equipment in relation to walls in the Attach Feature tool. Added new properties of structural objects. A new command has been added to create multiple architectural structures from a base object. IFC import and export supports XNUMXD data such as lines and text.
- In the environment for two-dimensional drawing (Draft), the Draft Hatch command has been added to hatch the faces of the selected object using templates from files in the PAT (AutoCAD) format. Added command to add named groups.
- The capabilities of the FEM (Finite Element Module) environment have been expanded, providing tools for finite element analysis, which can be used, for example, to assess the impact of various mechanical influences on the object being developed (resistance to vibration, heat and deformation). Brought to a full Z88 Solver that can be used for complex simulations. With the help of Calculix Solver, the ability to perform a bend analysis is implemented. New properties and the ability to recombine 3D meshes have been added to the Gmsh polygon meshing tool.
- The environment for working with OpenCasCade (Part) objects provides correct support for extrusion of internal structures.
- Improved environments for creating blanks (PartDesign), sketching 2D shapes (Sketcher), maintaining spreadsheets with model parameters (Spreadsheet), generating G-Code instructions for CNC machines and 3D printers (Path), 2D modeling and creating 2D projections of 3D models (TechDraw), designing the work of prefabricated multicomponent structures (Assembly3 and Assembly4).
- Completed project migration to Qt 5.x and Python 3.x. Building with Python 2 and Qt4 is no longer supported.
Source: opennet.ru