About FreeCAD

FreeCAD will be a general purpose 3D CAD modeler. The development is be completely Open Source. As with many modern 3D CAD modelers it will have a 2D component in order to extract design detail from the 3D model to create 2D production drawings, although 2D (e.g. AutoCAD LT) is not the focus, neither are animation and organic shapes (e.g. Maya, 3D StudioMAX and Cinema 4D).

FreeCAD is aimed directly at mechanical engineering, product design and related features like CatiaV4 and V5, SolidWorks and Solid Edge, and therefore also falls into the category of MCAD, PLM, CAx and CAE. It will be a feature based parametric modeler with a modular software architecture which makes it easy to provide additional functionality without modifying the core system.

Got curious? Take a look at the Feature list or the Getting started articles.

A major concern of FreeCAD is to make heavy use of all the great libraries that exist out there in the field of Scientific Computing. Among them are:


 * OpenCascade, a powerful CAD kernel
 * Coin3D, an incarnation of OpenInventor
 * Qt, the world-famous UI framework