Defeaturing Workbench

Introduction


Defeaturing WB is an add-on workbench intended for editing STEP models, removing of the selected features from the model. It is not part of the standard FreeCAD install.

It is also possible to direct modeling the model, when the history of operations is unavailable. (This is the case for 3d STEP models). Defeaturing can also useful to remove proprietary details of the model before sharing it.

Features:

Defeaturing WB: a set of tools to edit a Shape or a STEP model, removing holes, faces, simplifying the model, change the tolerance...

There are also tools to create more solid shapes, from edges, faces or shells.

These defeaturing and repairing tools work with FreeCAD 0.15, 0.16, 0.17 and 0.18. More advance defeaturing tools can be used if OCC7.3 are available.

Tools
Detailed description TBD



Defeaturing-WB: removing features



YouTube Tutorials:

simplifying the model



multi-select faces for defeaturing



Defeaturing
Removing Features using OCC7.3 new tools



Repairing

 * Sew a Shape
 * Removing or Simplify Faces
 * Remove Holes or Pockets
 * Read or Change Tolerance

Automatic installation
- automatically using the FreeCAD Add-on Manager (bundled in to 0.17 dev version under Tools Menu)

From GitHub
- manually by copying the Manipulator folder to the Mod sub-directory of the FreeCAD application.

FC Defeaturing WB github page

Supports

 * FreeCAD v0.15 4671
 * FreeCAD v0.16 >= 6712
 * FreeCAD v0.17 >= 13522
 * FreeCAD v0.18

External workbenches
FreeCAD workbenches are easy to program in Python, there are therefore many people developing additional workbenches outside of the FreeCAD main developers.

The external workbenches page has some information and tutorials on some of them, and the FreeCAD Addons project aims at gathering them and making them easily installable from within FreeCAD.

New workbenches are in development, stay tuned!