FreeCAD News

We’ve writ­ten numer­ous tuto­ri­als recent­ly look­ing at some of the larg­er changes and devel­op­ments in the upcom­ing FreeCAD ver­sion 1.0 which can already be found in the cur­rent release can­di­date and the week­ly devel­op­er ver­sions of FreeCAD. The recent tuto­ri­als include the On View Para­me­ter fea­tures in the Sketch­er work­bench and the new Assem­bly work­bench.

A small­er, but per­haps quite notice­able fea­ture, is that we now have an adjustable light source in our pre­view win­dow to pro­vide some light and shade on our mod­els. Let’s look at how to adjust this new feature.

Open a FreeCAD project with a mod­el in the pre­view win­dow and take a moment to look at the way it is lit. Next, from with­in any work­bench, let’s click “Edit – Pref­er­ences”. In the pref­er­ences dia­logue click the “Dis­play” drop down item from the list on the left hand side. In the drop down select the “Light Sources” option.

It’s rea­son­ably straight­for­ward to make adjust­ments to the light­ing source. A colour selec­tor menu is avail­able labelled “Light Source” where you can alter the colour of the light­ing. Note that next to this is a check­box, if you clear the tick from this check­box you can turn off and on the light source. At the top of the dia­logue you will see a slid­er labelled “Inten­si­ty” you can adjust the lev­el of light­ing using this.

With the light source check box ticked you can adjust the angle of the light source rel­a­tive to your mod­el by grab­bing the han­dle arrow attached to the grey ball. You do this by left click­ing on the han­dle arrow and drag­ging it around. The pre­view win­dow changes the light­ing source con­di­tions on the grey ball at the cen­tre of the win­dow giv­ing feed­back of how the light­ing source will look once applied to your model.

Once you have adjust­ed the light­ing source to your sat­is­fac­tion click the “Apply” but­ton, if you move the pref­er­ences win­dow to the side of your dis­play you can see the effect and read­just if need­ed. Once hap­py click OK to close the the pref­er­ences dialogue.