FreeCAD News

It’s fair to say FreeCAD has a lot of tools and fea­tures and it’s com­mon to focus on learn­ing the tools that help you realise your designs. As such it’s also com­mon to miss fea­tures that have been avail­able in FreeCAD for quite some time. It’s notice­able online some­times that peo­ple often post small video screen cap­tures of their projects with the project pre­view revolv­ing. Often you then see ques­tions or com­ments on “how do you animate/revolve your part like that?”

The turntable tool is avail­able from every work­bench in FreeCAD and can be found by click­ing “Tools – View Turntable…”. When you select the tool a small dia­logue appears where you can set the speed of rota­tion and also the angle of rota­tion. You can also set a timer and also enable full screen. Once you have cre­at­ed your set­tings you sim­ple click the “play” but­ton to start the turntable rotation.

One thing of note is that the view of your project in the pre­view win­dow influ­ences the posi­tion of the ani­ma­tion. So if your pre­view win­dow has your part or project off to one side the rota­tion will be tran­scribed around a larg­er arc than if your part or project is in the cen­tre of the pre­view pane.

Final­ly, not part of FreeCAD, but the final part of the puz­zle for cre­at­ing sim­ple rotat­ing ani­ma­tion clips to show off your project online is to grab a screen record­ing appli­ca­tion for your oper­at­ing sys­tem. There are lots out there regard­less of your oper­at­ing system.