FreeCAD Draft Workbench Intermediate Course Overview

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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 covers creation of layers and their setup.
  • In the third part, the first geometry is drafted - the geometry representing walls cutouts.
  • Working with compound objects is covered in the fourth lesson of the course. Attendees will learn how to create a door compound object, which is much easier to work with than individual lines and arcs.
  • The fifth part explains how to create hatch objects, which represent cuts of walls and their materials.
  • In the sixth part of the course, text creation is explained. Text is used for room numbers and names.
  • The seventh part of the course is quite long as it covers setup and creation of dimensions in the floor plan. Working with annotation styles is covered in this lesson too.
  • In the eighth part, viewers will learn how to create sheets with tile block. This is done using the Tech Draw workbench. This lesson also covers exporting the sheet to a PDF file format.
  • The last part shows creation of the room schedule on the sheet. Spreadsheet workbench is used for creating the schedule.

The course also includes one bonus video, where the use of 'Split All' and 'Shape To Draft Line' macros is demonstrated. These streamline some of the tedious repetitive steps encountered during the course using the standard set of tools. Macros are small programs in FreeCAD easily created by users to fit their exact needs. These two macros were created by one of the of the course's viewers, Chris Cruso.

FreeCAD user interface during the course

Even though the course is tailored for intermediate users of FreeCAD Draft workbench, it should not be hard for complete beginners to follow the course. The course provides comprehensive insight into the capabilities of FreeCAD as a drafting software. Draft workbench is also very useful when creating 3D models. It is especially closely linked to the BIM workbench - this course is also recommended for anyone, who is interested in BIM modeling. It will give them the basics, so that when Draft tools are needed for creation of BIM objects, nothing will surprise them.

The course is available for free as a Youtube course.  The source materials for the course are also available to download for free. The FreeCAD version used throughout the course is 1.1.0.

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