BIM ingame tutorial

Welcome to the BIM workbench!
This tutorial will walk you through the different functionalities of the BIM workbench and help you to get on tracks by modeling a very simple project. It should take around one hour to complete entirely.

You can interrupt it anytime and resume it later, by selecting menu Help -> Welcome screen, and clicking the BIM Tutorial item again.

Some steps of this tutorial require you to take actions. Those will be indicated below this text box, with an icon showing if the task has been completed or not. But since we are good people here at FreeCAD, you can continue to browse through this tutorial even if the actions have not been completed.

Set FreeCAD up
FreeCAD has a large preferences system with many options to set, located under menu Edit->Preferences. Each additional workbench can add more preferences pages, which makes it very complex.

The BIM workbench provides a simplified setup screen, which allows to quickly set some of the most useful preferences for BIM work. The BIM preferences screen is located under menu Manage -> BIM Setup (you can also click the corresponding button on the Manage toolbar):



Open the simplified BIM preferences screen now, and set the different options to your liking.

In case of need, hover the mouse over any option or setting to see a description of what it is used for:



Find your marks in the 3D view
There are several ways to interact with the mouse. In FreeCAD, these are called mouse models. You can change the current mouse model anytime by clicking on the mouse model widget in the status bar. Hovering the widget will also show you what each mouse button does. Choose one you are comfortable with.



Controlling how you are viewing your model in the 3D view can be done in multiple ways: Using the mouse (depending on the mouse model you chose), the keyboard (explore the contents of the View menu to find out more), or the navigation cube (click and drag the different faces of the cube to align the view).