FreeCAD News

This week in FreeCAD devel­op­ment, major changes have been in Assem­bly, CAM, and Tech­Draw work­bench­es, as well as in the new mate­ri­als system.

Assem­bly got three new joint types: ‘Angle’, ‘Per­pen­dic­u­lar’, and ‘Par­al­lel’, all added by PaddleStroke.

CAM:

• slip­ton­ic took a first step towards a bet­ter CAM tool sys­tem. This has been dis­cussed at length with the design work­ing group, more changes will follow.
• phaseloop reworked the VCarve oper­a­tion to include fea­tures that are most­ly avail­able in com­mer­cial soft­ware: step down, fin­ish­ing, pass, and head move­ment opti­miza­tion. They dras­ti­cal­ly improve carved sur­face qual­i­ty while decreas­ing the carv­ing time by up to 50%. See this dis­cus­sion for details and pho­to examples.

Tech­Draw: Pad­dle­Stroke con­tributed snap­ping of view to views and dimen­sions to dimen­sions, he also added snap­ping of val­ue to cen­ters of dimen­sions, Wan­der­erFan con­tributed var­i­ous fixes.

Mate­ri­als: dav­es­rock­et­shop made fur­ther improve­ments to the new mate­ri­als system:

• New inspec­tors for the Appear­ance and Mate­r­i­al prop­er­ties of an object have been added. They are intend­ed for debug­ging Appear­ance and Mate­r­i­al issues in models.
• Edi­tor’s UI has been enhanced: you can now set a default col­or to be used when cre­at­ing a new mate­r­i­al, plus the name of the mate­r­i­al Prop­er­ties tab has been changed to Phys­i­cal for improved con­sis­ten­cy in the user interface.
• New Mate­r­i­al Fil­ter API is now avail­able, devel­op­ers can use to e.g. request a list of all machin­able mate­ri­als in the CAM workbench.

BIM: yorik­van­havre did fur­ther post-merge cleanup, and paullee0 added a new ‘Off­set per Edge’ fea­ture in ArchWall.

UI/UX:

• Devel­op­ers start­ed using new logo in var­i­ous bits of the program.
• Icon updates were con­tributed by maxwxyz and marcuspollio.
• Addi­tion­al­ly, task pan­els cleanup for Sketch­er and Part Design was con­tributed by marcuspollio.

Among oth­er changes:

• Fur­ther topon­am­ing patch­es by bgb­sww and yorik­van­havre (in Draft).
• Draft WB got fix­es and par­tial new mate­ri­als sys­tem sup­port, thanks to Roy-043.
• Addon Man­ag­er: pieter­hi­j­ma added sup­port­ing for start­ing the Addon Man­ag­er for a spe­cif­ic addon (e.g. to update the addon).
• New Mea­sure tool has been improved: hlorus made the ini­tial mea­sure­ment place­ment scale with view­port zoom.
• Fix­es to FEM by marioalexis84 and NewJoker.
• Fix­es and new tests in Sketch­er, by wwmay­er and PaddleStroke.
• Head­light inten­si­ty val­ue is now decreased when enter­ing Edit mode in Sketch­er. This has been patched by Syres916, but the com­mu­ni­ty keeps dis­cussing bet­ter ways to make edit­ing sketch­es eas­i­er to do, when you cre­ate a sketch from a face.
• Var­i­ous core fix­es by pieter­hi­j­ma and wwmayer.
• GUI fix­es by 0penBrain.
• Unused code removal in Mesh by mosfet80

PR stats: In the week from Wednes­day, 22 May to Wednes­day, 29 May there were 75 pull requests merged. 36 new pull requests were opened.

Issue stats: we closed 49 issues, and 50 new issues were opened. Over­all, 1,659 issues are cur­rent­ly open.