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This is a news source for architects, engineers, builders, planners, and professionals interested in free software for the built environment.
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Open CAD Studio is a GPL-3.0-licensed 2D drafting and 3D modelling application written in Rust. Its central goal is native reading and writing of DWG and DXF files from R13 through R2018, without depending on proprietary CAD libraries or a separate conversion workflow. ...
Blender 5.2 LTS has been released with long-term support until July 2028. Its largest addition is an experimental Geometry Nodes physics system for procedural hair and cloth simulation, alongside geometry bundles and lists, a Bevel node, audio sampling, and support for Geometry Nodes on Empty objects. ...
The FreeCAD Project Association has approved three grants for Q2 2026. João Matos will receive EUR 4,000 to develop BIM Plan Edit, a focused 2D editing context for working with walls, openings, spaces, and symbols on a selected building storey. ...
Magik has published LibreCAD in your browser, a WebAssembly port that runs the full GPL-licensed LibreCAD desktop application in a browser tab rather than a reduced viewer or JavaScript reimplementation. The demo loads the C++ and Qt application through Emscripten and Qt for WebAssembly, with the fork available as LibreCAD-Web. ...
Wassim Jabi has published an introduction to TGraph, describing it as a more explicit and efficient graph representation for TopologicPy. TopologicPy is an open source Python library for spatial modelling and analysis in architecture, engineering, and construction. Its graph-based representation is used to connect geometry, topology, information, graph databases, knowledge graphs, GraphRAG workflows, and graph machine learning. A clearer graph layer is therefore relevant for workflows that need to reason about spaces, adjacency, connectivity, and semantic relationships rather than only geometric shape. ...
IFClite merged PR #1182, a contribution from Mathias Sønderskov Schaltz that lets IFClite parse IFC inside the CAD process — as a plain DLL. The clean way to call a Rust engine from Grasshopper or Revit used to mean running a local server and talking to it over HTTP. But the moment something opens a port on a managed machine, enterprise IT lights up: firewall rules, security reviews, the whole dance. The FFI wires IFClite straight into the process instead. A new ifc-lite-ffi crate builds with crate-type = ["cdylib"] to ifc_lite_ffi.dll, and the host loads it like any other library. No server. No port. No network. Just a function call. ...
BIMvoice Academy has opened its practical openBIM training library for free. In an OSArch community post, Petru Conduraru says the free material includes courses on IFC schema in practice, IDS, Revit to IFC, native IFC building modelling, bridge modelling in IFC4x3, Bonsai, and drawing production directly from IFC. ...
IFClite has merged PR #1024, replacing its two boolean backends with a single pure-Rust exact CSG kernel. The browser build previously relied on the C++ Manifold library via WASM cross-compilation; the native server path used an in-tree BSP port. Both are gone. The new kernel is a clean-room mesh-arrangement implementation: operand meshes are intersected conformingly (shared symbolic vertices for line-plane and triple-plane intersection points), re-triangulated under exact predicates, then classified for difference, union, or intersection. Every topology decision routes through a predicate cascade (interval filter, fixed-width tier, BigRational oracle) built on Shewchuk adaptive predicates for explicit coordinates and Cherchi-style indirect predicates (Attene 2020) for implicit intersection geometry. The public API (processGeometryBatch, SDK surface) is unchanged; consumers see different triangulations wherever booleans fire. ...
Ladybug Tools has announced new Dragonfly district thermal system simulation workflows, developed through several years of collaboration with teams at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, now the National Lab of the Rockies, around the URBANopt SDK. The new Dragonfly District Thermal components are aimed at feasibility studies for fourth- and fifth-generation district energy systems. ...
That Open Company has opened registration for the That Open Platform launch, with the launch window scheduled for June 22, 2026. The page describes That Open Platform as a place to “build, connect and operate” AECO software, positioned around the open technology already used by BIM applications and developers. ...