Sandbox:TutorialArchBIM

Goal of this document
Update original Arch Tutorial by Yorik van Havre.

The purpose was to seriously try to learn some Freecad Work flows, after playing with it at various points in time for at least the last 5 years.

Reflect version 0.17 / 0.18 of Freecad Use a BIM workflow

Introduction
Freecad Arch Tutorial update

Typical workflows
In this tutorial we focus on a BIM oriented approach of using FreeCad. We will use mostly three workbenches: Arch Workbench and BIM, of course, but also Draft, whose tools are all included in Arch, so there is no need to switch workbenches, and Sketcher. Conveniently, can create a custom toolbar in your Arch workbench, with Tools → Customize, and add the tools from the sketcher that you use often.

Preparation
Instead of creating a project from scratch, let's take an example project to model, it will save us time. This wonderful house by the famous architect Vilanova Artigas (see a series of pictures by Pedro Kok), because it is close to where Yorik lives. It is simple, it's a wonderful example of the amazing modernist architecture of São Paulo. Drawings in dwg format are easily available. We will use the 2D DWG drawings obtained from the link above (you need to register on the above site to download, but it's free, or grab directly a dxf version here) as a base to build our model. So the first thing you'll want to do is to download the file, unzip it, and open the DWG file inside with a dwg application such as DraftSight. Alternatively, you can convert it to DXF with a free utility such as the Teigha File Converter. If you have the Teigha converter installed (and its path set in the Arch preferences settings), FreeCAD is also able to import DWG files directly. But since these files can sometimes be of bad quality and very heavy, it's usually better to open it first with a 2D CAD application and do some cleaning. Here, all the detail drawings are removed, all the title-blocks and page layouts. A "clean" ("purge" in AutoCAD slang) to remove all unused entities, reorganized the sections at a logical location in relation to the plan view, and moved everything to the (0,0) point. After that, our file can be opened quite efficiently in FreeCAD. Check the different options available in Edit → Preferences →



This is how the file looks after being opened in FreeCAD. Changed the thickness of the walls (the contents of the "muros" group), and flipped a couple of doors that were imported with wrong X scale, with the Draft Scale tool:

Customizing Arch WorkBench
This is an example "customized" Arch workbench:



In this tutorial, we will model the house in 3D, based on the 2D drawings we will download from the net, and extract from it 2D documents, such as plans, elevations and sections.