Draft tutorial Outdated

This tutorial will teach you how to use FreeCAD's 2D drafting module (also called Draft module) to create a simple architecture drawing. For this purpose, we will be drawing a simple masonry cabin. Let's assume that we received a CAD drawing showing the location of the cabin, and we'll use it to draw our project on top of it. We'll draw a plan, a section and two elevations.

Keep in mind that FreeCAD is still in an early stage of development, so you might not be as productive as with another CAD application, and you might (read: will) encounter bugs, or experience crashes. Save your work often!

Setting up your FreeCAD workspace
FreeCAD is a 3D modeler, but in this tutorial we will use it only for working in 2D. So, we will be drawing on the ground plane, and everything we do will have a Z coordinate of zero. So first, let's put ourselves in top view by pressing the and be sure we are in orthographic projection (key ) otherwise we might get fooled by some perspective effects.

Another very important thing to do, is to give custom hotkeys to your Draft commands. So you can do all the commands from the keyboard, which will drastically improve your speed. Basically you can do about everything from the keyboard, and will need the mouse only to draw points and select objects. Go to menu Customize -> Keyboard -> Category Python and select shortcuts as you like, a good idea is to make them easy to remember. For example, I use L for Line, W for Polyline (also called Wire in FreeCAD), A for Arc, C for Circle, M for Move, R for Rotate, F for Offset (O is already taken by Orthographic), D for Dimension, T for Text, etc...

Now we are set up, we can begin to draw.

Importing CAD drawings
If you are going to import a 2D cad drawing, chances are high that they will be in a proprietary format such as .dwg (from AutoCAD) or .mcd (from VectorWorks). The specification of those file formats are being kept secret by their vendors, so it is extremely difficult or totally impossible for FreeCAD to support them. However, One file format that is fairly well documented is the dxf format, and the Draft module supports it partially.

Almost all CAD applications can export to the dxf format, and you also have several free converters such as openDWG's EveryDWG converter utility, that will allow you to convert your file to the dxf format. For example, Doublecad is a free, fully functional CAD program that allows you to export DXF files:



Open your dxf file simply with the File -> Open dialog. Several import settings can be configured in the Draft preferences screen. For example, you can configure if you want the DXF file to be imported with original colors and linewidths, or converted to current Draft color, that you see at the right side of the Draft command bar. But in FreeCAD you won't need to attribute ugly colors to your objects to determine their linewidth. Objects all have independent color and linewidth attributes. So, you can very well forget about DXF colors, or convert everything to the colors of your choice.

After importing your drawing in FreeCAD, it will look like this: