Drawing Workbench

The Drawing module is made to allow you to put your 3D work on paper. That is, to put views of your models in a 2D window, and to insert that window in a drawing, for example a sheet, with a border, a title and your logo, and finally to print that sheet. The Drawing module is currently under construction and more or less a technology preview!

In the picture you see the main concepts of the Drawing module. The document contains a Shape object (Schenkel) which we want to extract to a drawing. Therefore a "Page" was created. A page gets instantiated through a template. In this case A3_Landscape. The Template is a SVG document which holds frames, logos and complies to some kind of standard.

In this page we can insert one or more views. Each view has a position on the page (Properties X,Y), a scale factor (Property scale) and additional properties. Every time the page or the view or the referenced object changes, the page gets regenerated and the page display updated.

Scripting

At the moment the end user work flows are very limited. So maybe the scripting is more interesting. example how to use the scripting API of the drawing module

example how to use the scripting API of the drawing module

first of all you need the Part and the Drawing module:

import FreeCAD, Part, Drawing

create a small sample part

Part.show(Part.makeBox(100,100,100).cut(Part.makeCylinder(80,100)).cut(Part.makeBox(90,40,100)).cut(Part.makeBox(20,85,100)))

direct projection. The G0 means hard edge, the G1 is tangend continues.

Shape = App.ActiveDocument.Shape.Shape
[visiblyG0,visiblyG1,hiddenG0,hiddenG1] = Drawing.project(Shape)
print "visible edges:", len(visiblyG0.Edges)
print "hidden edges:", len(hiddenG0.Edges)

all was projected on the Z-plane:

print "Bnd Box shape: X=",Shape.BoundBox.XLength," Y=",Shape.BoundBox.YLength," Z=",Shape.BoundBox.ZLength
print "Bnd Box project: X=",visiblyG0.BoundBox.XLength," Y=",visiblyG0.BoundBox.YLength," Z=",visiblyG0.BoundBox.ZLength

different projection vector

[visiblyG0,visiblyG1,hiddenG0,hiddenG1] = Drawing.project(Shape,Base.Vector(1,1,1))

project to SVG

resultSVG = Drawing.projectToSVG(Shape,App.Vector(1,1,1))
print resultSVG

And now the parametric way

insert a Page object and assign a template

App.activeDocument().addObject('Drawing::FeaturePage','Page')
App.activeDocument().Page.Template = App.ConfigGet('AppHomePath')+'Mod/Drawing/Templates/A3_Landscape.svg'

create a view on the "Shape" object, define the position and scale and assign it to a Page

App.activeDocument().addObject('Drawing::FeatureViewPart','View')
App.activeDocument().View.Source = App.activeDocument().Shape
App.activeDocument().View.Direction = (0.0,0.0,1.0)
App.activeDocument().View.X = 10.0
App.activeDocument().View.Y = 10.0
App.activeDocument().Page.addObject(App.activeDocument().View)

create a second view on the same object but the view is rotated 90 degrees.

App.activeDocument().addObject('Drawing::FeatureViewPart','ViewRot')
App.activeDocument().ViewRot.Source = App.activeDocument().Shape
App.activeDocument().ViewRot.Direction = (0.0,0.0,1.0)
App.activeDocument().ViewRot.X = 290.0
App.activeDocument().ViewRot.Y = 30.0
App.activeDocument().ViewRot.Scale = 1.0
App.activeDocument().ViewRot.Rotation = 90.0
App.activeDocument().Page.addObject(App.activeDocument().ViewRot)

create a third view on the same object but with an isometric view direction. Also the hidden lines are activated.

App.activeDocument().addObject('Drawing::FeatureViewPart','ViewIso')
App.activeDocument().ViewIso.Source = App.activeDocument().Shape
App.activeDocument().ViewIso.Direction = (1.0,1.0,1.0)
App.activeDocument().ViewIso.X = 335.0
App.activeDocument().ViewIso.Y = 140.0
App.activeDocument().ViewIso.ShowHiddenLines = True
App.activeDocument().Page.addObject(App.activeDocument().ViewIso)

change something and update. The update process change the view and the page

App.activeDocument().View.X = 30.0
App.activeDocument().View.Y = 30.0
App.activeDocument().View.Scale = 1.5
App.activeDocument().recompute()

Accessing the bits and peaces: get the SVG fragment of a single view

ViewSVG = App.activeDocument().View.ViewResult
print ViewSVG

get the hole result page (its a file in the document temp dir, only read allowed)

print "Resulting SVG document: ",App.activeDocument().Page.PageResult
file = open(App.activeDocument().Page.PageResult,"r")
print "Result page is ",len(file.readlines())," lines long"

important, give free the file!

del file

insert a view with your own content:

App.activeDocument().addObject('Drawing::FeatureView','ViewSelf')
App.activeDocument().ViewSelf.ViewResult = """<g id="ViewSelf"
  stroke="rgb(0, 0, 0)"
  stroke-width="0.35"
  stroke-linecap="butt"
  stroke-linejoin="miter"
  transform="translate(30,30)"
  fill="#00cc00"
 >

<ellipse cx="40" cy="40" rx="30" ry="15"/>
</g>
"""
App.activeDocument().Page.addObject(App.activeDocument().ViewSelf)

App.activeDocument().recompute()

del Shape,ViewSVG, resultSVG

That leads to following result: