002 - Blender & Freecad Arch Workflow - Walls

[@rtakao2007]

Thank you! I am an architect recently graduated in Brazil. I'm abandoning Sketchup and looking for better and free solutions. That was my biggest question: How to make technical drawings of models from Blender on Freecad. Thank you very much!

[@RegisNdeTene]

Sure OpenSource venture is not as easy but with slow pace progress various tasks can be achieved. I'm glad it was helpful. This development could also be of interest to you blenderartists.org/t/freecad-sverchok-subd-to-nurbs/1218702/23

[@MrMosaed]

Thank you.

[@RegisNdeTene]

You are mostly welcomed

[@kaziannova]

Hi Regis. I'm trying to decide if I should go with Blender or FreeCad for architectural designs and BIM. Which do you prefer, which is easier to use and why?

[@RegisNdeTene]

hmmm hard question as it is a relative to what you wish to acheive decision. I will try to give you the best well rounded answer possible so it can orient your decision. Blender is super powerful, for presentations, for modeling aswell, and because it serves the film and animation industry extremely well, it offers a tremendously array of flexibility in Design (that is if your interest in architecture is design oriented, for example great architectural concepts, concepts viz, futuristic ideas, etc etc Blender is perfect and endless for such kinds of things and you can create so many iterations in record speeds once you know how to use it to it's fullest.) Now ofcourse Architecture doesn't end just in Design etc, if you need to start looking into things like Documentation, Construction documents, creating such information (this is where we begin to come accross concepts like BIM, creating information for building from building modeling) then Freecad is mostly appropriate. But building information modeling is a stage in the Design process that's often towards the end of the cycle of a project, i.e the direction of the building has mostly been figured out and decided, so you don't much ideation but mostly attempt to start to prepare documentation for construction. Now blender can also tackle documention but it will not have the same flexibility in tools available for that, so if you have to manage many projects at the same time, it will quickly demonstrate that it is not well suited because the program wasn't built with that consideration in mind. But if it is a one time swing and you will never need to do documention for one project you are working on, well you can try it in blender. Personally I prefer to use both, I have a longtime story with blender and i've seen it mature over the years and i'm aware of its strenghts so i can't toss it to the side. It is just too powerful and too flexible and so well rounded for many different industries including architecture. Both are also well compatible, this is what I attempt to show on my youtube channel that there is a workflow that can be achieved with both application so harnessing these programs at different design stages can become very interesting in the open source world, something which is new and wasn't always possible before. In terms of ease of use, Blender due to it's dense abilities can be slightly more lenghty in terms of learning curve. But the new blender interface for the 2.8 has brought that learning curve even down completely. But in my videos i'm very basic so you can learn just the basics if that's what you need to do what you need. But if you want to be extremely profficient and have the confidence that you can create anything your creative mind wishes since architects are generally creative then learning the full scope of blender can take slightly more time in general since you must explore all its features and sometimes features used in other industries can be adapted to use for architecture if you know what you want do once again. Now Freecad is generally less demanding in terms of learning curve than blender. However freecad has serveral workbenches which can also help architectural modeling, so we can also say that if you wish to know how to use potential other WorkBenches it can also be almost an equal time in learning curve as blender. But if you focus just on the Main workbenches for architecture, i.e "Arch WB, new BIM WB which is just the ArchWB on stereoids and still being developed by Yorik, and draftWB and SketcherWB, they are fairly simple and have tools intermixed within them so it's not like you are learning a new workbench from scratch. Since the same tool is available in the other WB. Now all this said, these open source are relatively simple compared to their commerical alternatives, for example learning curve of blender is very small probably a 3-5 level vs Maya or 3ds Max which is 10-20 level (meaning it can take you years to get familiar in a way that is useful, or Freecad is a 2 level when Archicad and Revit are 10+ levels. Now don't get me wrong, the commercial alternatives are very powerful aswell, but they tend to also be very specific and not as flexible. I.e Revit is just for architecture, Freecad like blender can do Architectural, Mechanical, etc etc.... hope this answers your question

[@kaziannova]

@@RegisNdeTene Thank you very much and thank you for the prompt reply. You've got yourself another subscriber and I will definitely check out more of your videos. Cheers!

[@kaziannova]

@@RegisNdeTene One last thing. I like the idea that FreeCad is easier to learn and better for architectural designs and BIM. However, it's 3D rendering is not as advance as Blender (so it seems from all the pictures I've seen). So would I be able to import FreeCad files into Blender to render the 3D architectures?

[@RegisNdeTene]

@@kaziannova Yes, you will be able to import any freecad model into blender and vice versa. That is why the relationship between those two softs gives you a potent capability to acheive what ever you want. Yes you noticed right, freecad currently doesn't have a well developed rendering engine, but Yorik is working on one that should be a bit more better, but since open source development depends on freecad time the developers have, it takes some time to have some features implement, but Freecad can be as powerful as commercial softs if enough developers jump in to push it forward. So don't expect it to be perfect or without some drawbacks aswell. It's still a baby software, but already powerful for what it can currently do for Open Source. and just like blender grew to become what it is today, Freecad will have the same evolution. So I think just having these two programs under your belt should suffice most if not all your architecture needs. One last thing I can mention to spice things up a bit, is that both freecad and blender are programmed in python which is the language of choice for AI machine learning used by google and most others in this field, so someone who is really good and wants to play can plug and enhance Freecad for AI capabilities.

[@kaziannova]

@@RegisNdeTene You are quite knowledgable about both products as I see from your videos. I was wondering if FreeCad has options to import pre-made 3d objects from libraries such as Sketchup has from object warehouse. Examples would be if I want to import furniture, appliances, cars, people, etc...