FreeCAD 0.21 released
Last week, a new stable release of FreeCAD has been published, tagged 0.21. This release is mostly there to provide a stable point before implementing Toponaming resolution functionality. Toponaming is how we call the problem of unstable reference names in FreeCAD (Edge1 might become Edge5 after a shape recompute), it is the last big issue the development team wants to solve before deeming FreeCAD good for the mythical 1.0 release.
Nevertheless, this release brings a number of interesting improvements for BIM users, among which are:
- New spline tools for the sketcher
- A new, easy-to-use section tool that works interactively, and works for Arch/BIM objects too
- Better styling tools for texts and dimensions, which now use an unified structure
- The BIM layer manager is now in Draft too
- FreeCAD now supports several different DWG converters to import and export DWG files
- The FEM workbench has received a lot of improvements, and is now more and more fit for civil engineering (see this post and the work of Ebrahim)
- Revamped addons manager
More about these features and much more can be found in the release notes.
In parallel to the work being done in FreeCAD itself, many things have happened on the BIM workbench, namely the arrival of a new NativeIFC module, that allows FreeCAD to open, manipulate and save IFC files natively. This turns FreeCAD the second NativeIFC-enabled authoring application, after BlenderBIM (Both actually share a lot of code). The NativeIFC structure is progressively being integrated into the BIM workbench, and a lot of it is already directly usable by BIM users. Check the documentation to know more, of follow this osarch discussion thread to keep updated on the progresses.
