FCB Lounge Blog

The FreeCAD Project Association (FPA) has announced three grants that were approved in Q3 of 2026. These projects have been accepted to the grant program and engineers working on them will be awarded compensation when they deliver the products specified in their grant applications.  These are the three approved grants in this quarter: Improving FreeCAD's Real-Time Rendering Quality by João Matos: this proposal aims to improve FreeCAD's viewport rendering quality - physically based material shading, environment lighting, real-time ambient occlusion, real time directional light shadows and other features. Note that this proposal focuses of viewport rendering, not offline rendering for creating render images and videos. This grant proposal builds on previous grant work delivered by João. 4000 EUR will be awarded for this grant work, details are available on GitHub . TechDraw Toponaming and Feature Identification by Morten Vajhøj : currently, the TechDraw workbench does not hand...

Open CAD Studio development does not seem to be slowing down. During the past month, several important features were added and many bugs were fixed. Thanks to the weekly release schedule,  Open CAD Studio  moves forward very fast. Some of the new features introduced last month include: First implementation of DGN support added. First implementation of DWF support added. Moved parametric modeling tools to independent ribbon tab. These tools enable users to constrain the geometry to create parametric models. New external reference attachment dialogue. This enables complex setup of XREF during the first insertion. New PDF attach dialogue, with all the needed import options setup. PDF is now imported as a vector geometry and enables snapping and turning PDF layers on and off. New XCLIP tool for clipping external references, PDF and raster image attachments. Introduction of the table tool. Basic node based graph added. This is a tool similar to Dynamo in Revit. Improvements to the...