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Re:FreeCAD BIM development news December 2018 by walkingolof on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @02:06PM (#18801657)
Just use Sketchup, I did the drawings for my new office in Sketchup, took it to a construction engineer who remodel it in some professional tool and I got back all the numbers I needed for my permit.

I really wanted to use FreeCAD but I cant afford to spend that amount of time needed to learn to work with it....

Re:FreeCAD BIM development news December 2018 by justinclift on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @12:40PM (#18808102)
> who remodel it in some professional tool ...

One of the huge disadvantages of SketchUp, is that it doesn't create geometry which is easily (and accurately) shared with other CAD/CAM systems. :(

Any kind of export/import to standard CAD/CAM model formats (STEP, IGES, even JT) would do.

(Note - I last looked a few months ago, so it's possible something has changed since then. Wouldn't bet money on it though, as it seems to be "in purpose" but I'm not sure why.)

FreeCAD on the other hand does use the right kind of geometry, and imports/exports the right formats natively. Your construction engineer would likely have been able to import a FreeCAD created model directly, instead of having to remodel it from scratch. Assuming the model was created decently well of course. ;)

That could have saved a bunch of time.

Re:FreeCAD BIM development news December 2018 by Something1234 on Wednesday January 02, 2019 @03:39PM (#18809962)
Any idea what the history of sketchup is and how Google lost it? I loved that tool. Why couldn't they have open sourced it?