FreeCAD News

After many per­son-hours of effort, last week a new type of sec­tion view, Com­plex Sec­tion, was added to the Tech­Draw work­bench. This new type of sec­tion allows essen­tial­ly arbi­trary cross-sec­tions to be extract­ed from 3D geom­e­try and dis­played in Tech­Draw by spec­i­fy­ing a spe­cif­ic object as the “pro­file object” to use.

Accord­ing to Tech­Draw’s lead devel­op­er, “wan­der­erfan”:

The premise is that the user gen­er­ates a “cut­ting pro­file” using Sketch­er or Draft, any­thing that will cre­ate a wire or edge. This pro­file is extrud­ed into a cut­ting tool that is used to remove mate­r­i­al from a source shape. You can make a stand alone Com­plex­Sec­tion fea­ture, or one based on an exist­ing view.

This fea­ture is avail­able for beta test­ing in FreeCAD’s var­i­ous Night­ly and Week­ly builds, and will be includ­ed in the next major release of the soft­ware. Thanks to wan­der­erfan and all of the FreeCAD Forums mem­bers who helped to test and improve the fea­ture in prepa­ra­tion for its release.