FCB Lounge Blog

FCB Lounge has created a free video course for those who are interested in utilizing FreeCAD to create complex 2D drawings: The FreeCAD Draft Intermediate Course . This course covers the basics and intermediate workflows in FreeCAD Draft workbench. The course will guide attendees through the creation of a floor plan of a building from the first line to creation of sheets and export to PDF. After completing the course, users will be able to create an architectural floor plan drawing with appropriate line thickness, line styles, hatch patterns, annotations, room schedule, and all of this will be placed on a sheet with a title block. Users will handle selection of objects, working with layers, setup for print and other important skills needed to use FreeCAD as a drafting software. The final result of the course: floor plan drawing of a garage building The course is divided into 9 video parts: The first part is the introduction to the course with basic information about it. The second part...

Open CAD Studio is a new free open source tool, which can be used for all kinds of engineering designs. It edits DWG and DXF file format natively, which is a great feature as the DWG file format is an industry standard format since the eighties. Open CAD Studio offers wide range of functionalities, including loading of 2D and 3D DWG files, wide range of 2D modelling tools, basic support for 3D modelling. It supports paper space objects and layouts, including built in PDF exporter. Users can of course use printing. The tool also supports layers, blocks, external references and other functionalities typical for a DWG project. User interface of Open CAD Studio Open CAD Studio has first been released at the beginning of 2026 and has provided rapid release cadence. The main developer of the software is Hakan Seven , a prolific software developer and geomatics engineer. As of summer 2026, the project has several other contributors, but most of the coding work is done by Hakan. The developme...

FreeCAD BIM Structural Project Course  is a free video course by FCB Lounge, which covers creation of a small structural engineering project in FreeCAD BIM from start to finish. It is aimed at intermediate FreeCAD users and is divided into 9 lessons and the overall length of the course is over 2 hours and 20 minutes. Structural building model created in FreeCAD BIM course Attendees of the course will learn how to setup FreeCAD for BIM work, how to create a structural model of a small building including slabs, columns, walls, slab and wall openings, and stairs - the whole BIM model including some of the IFC data. Large part of the course is dedicated to creation of 2D construction documentation from the 3D model. This includes creation of sheets with predefined title block, than creation of 2D floor plan of each level and adding necessary annotations to the floor plan, such as tags and dimensions. Placement of floor plans on sheets is also demonstrated in one of the lessons. Section...

FreeCAD 1.1.3 point release is available for download as the latest stable version. This release brings 79 bug fixes to users. It is recommended to upgrade if you are on FreeCAD 1.1.1 or earlier versions. It has been released shortly after the 1.1.2 release which had a bug that the FreeCAD team did not want the users to encounter. Here is the list of some of the fixes in the Draft and BIM workbenches: ✅ Fixed projection direction of hidden geometry in TechDraw_ArchView. ✅ Fixed fill of shaft-like objects in TechDraw_ArchView. ✅ Fixed double-click visibility behavior of views in Views Manager. ✅ Fixed duplicate processing in IFC export. ✅ Fixed import issues related to switching to Strict IFC. ✅ Fixed accuracy issue with roof subtraction. ✅ Updated BIM Classification Download URL. ✅ Fix clone diffuse color regression 2. You can download the new version from the official FreeCAD download page . You can read the release notes on the GitHub page . 

FCB Lounge Blog is dedicated to posting information about open source technologies in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) industry. Some of these technologies are software solutions like FreeCAD BIM, Bonsai, IFCLite, Open CAD Studio, IfcOpenShell and others. The blog is closely inked to FCB Lounge Youtube channel with FreeCAD BIM dedicated content, mostly tutorial explaining how to use FreeCAD for architectural and engineering work. The FCB Lounge Youtube channel can be accessed here . Another related Youtube channel in SPB Production, which covers other free open source solutions for the build environment. This channel covers Bonsai, Open CAD Studio, IFCLite and other FOSS software solutions. This SPB Production Youtube channel can be accessed here . SPB acronym stands for Speed, Power, Belief.