FreeCAD Project Association Announces Approved Grants for Q3 2026

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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:

  1. 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.
  2. TechDraw Toponaming and Feature Identification by Morten Vajhøj: currently, the TechDraw workbench does not handle toponaming issue well. This proposal aims to improve this situation, so that certain toponaming issues will be fixed in TechDraw workbench. More information can be accessed in the proposal, the total grant coverage is 2000 EUR.
  3. KiCad Integration for LENS: 3D Board Viewing, Dual ECAD/MCAD Viewers, and STEP Export by Amritpal Singh: this proposal will add KiCad integration to Ondsel Lens, which is an online vaulting and product data management (PDM) service. Currently there is no KiCad integration for Lens. This grant is funded by separate Ondsel Onward fund. For details, read the whole proposal. The budget for this grant is 3360 EUR.

There is no timeline set for when these projects should be delivered, it is not limited to the end of Q3. The FreeCAD Project Association is funded by donations and most of the collected funds are spent through grants like those awarded this quarter. The deadline for next quarter's grant applications is November 30th.


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