Yorik van Havre

BIM (Building Information Modeling) is a paradigm for 3D CAD models made for Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC). Long a closed, proprietary garden, it becomes more and more an open, hackable world thanks to several Free and Open-Source tools and formats.

This talk will try to illustrate how rich that world has become when your tinkering, hacking, coding itch starts to scratch...

In this talk, Dion (developer of BlenderBIM) and Yorik (developer of FreeCAD, specifically its BIM tools) will use these two applications and try to show some clever tricks that you can do with BIM models, that no proprietary software would dream to achieve.

A walk through the different ways in which people from different areas and backgrounds use a same application (FreeCAD), and the impact this has on their workflows, and even on FreeCAD development

The FreeCAD project gathers a community of developers and users coming from a very large array of specialties: Makers, mechanical engineers, civil engineers, electronics engineers, architects, opticians, graphic designers, etc. All these people using the same software is a unique opportunity to explore and build cross-discipline workflows, and have people coming from one field learn unusual ways from other fields. This constant interchange of paradigms also influences FreeCAD development itself, and connects it to other fields and applications too, to create larger ecosystems. In this talk, we will show some examples of how this happens in different areas.

This talk will showcase how FOSS design tools such as FreeCAD were used during the WikiLab project in São Paulo, Brazil, and how this can change the game in the construction field.

The WikiLab is a collaborative construction based on the WikiHouse project, that started in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2017 and is still occurring, being a continuous experience. The construction was done mostly by a team of volunteers, it mixes architecture, CNC manufacturing, collaborative planning, construction and management, ecological, technological and social research, and the whole design was done completely with free software, mostly FreeCAD. In this talk, I'll try to showcase how the use of free software had a very special impact on the project design and construction, how this reaches areas where no commercial software entered before, and how this can change the way we do architecture.

FreeCAD is a general purpose, open-source, multiplatform parametric 3D modeling application, geared mainly for product design, in other words anything that is meant to be built in the real world. The project started around 2002, and is today entering a a big momentum with the blossoming of home 3D printing and manufacturing, and thanks to is extreme hackability.

FreeCAD can be described as a big, modular "collage" between many heavyweight open-source libraries and projects, such as OpenCasCade (our geometry engine), Coin3D (an implementation of OpenInventor, which drives the 3D display), Qt and Python. But it can also, more accurately, be called a "python beast". With a bit of knowledge of the python language, its user is given the powers of a God.

Although programmed mainly in C++, python is everywhere in FreeCAD: It acts as a "glue" between the "core" part of the application, which handles all the heavy geometric calculations, and the Qt graphical interface. This offers a wealth of interesting features such as the separation of FreeCAD into a non-GUI (server mode) part and a GUI part, possibilities to record, tweak, drive, or interact with the python flow in many ways, and much more. Each of the main libraries used in FreeCAD also has its own python bindings, all usable inside FreeCAD, all connecting to the running application and able to operate on its contents, its objects, its interface, its 3D display.

Python code in FreeCAD is also constantly exposed to the user, turning the application very pedagogic. It is almost impossible to work with it without learning at least a bit of python. Many have tried.

This has formed a highly technically knowledgeable community around FreeCAD, where the differences between developer and user have blurred.

This talk will try to convey some of the amazing social/technical experience we have building this tool that is made to build.