FreeCAD News

F3D is a fab­u­lous open source allow­ing any­one to ren­der and view 3D mod­els. In it’s most sim­plest form you can go to the pub­lic web view­er and view a sam­ple file already pre loaded, or indeed open a file from your machine. Don’t let the ease of this fool you though, there is a wealth of func­tion­al­i­ty under the hood with a huge array of tweak-able options, from light­ing and posi­tion­ing to ani­ma­tion play­back and even video creation.

To top it all, as of ver­sion 4.0 it now includes the abil­i­ty to do all this with FreeCAD FCStd files. You can use the web view­er or indeed there are lots of options to down­load and install this local­ly, with pack­ages released for many oper­at­ing sys­tems. FreeCAD itself makes use of the F3D func­tion­al­i­ty, it’s used inside FreeCAD to gen­er­ate STEP file thumb­nails and more. 

Of course, many oth­er projects that are using F3D. A great exam­ple is Many­fold, the open source, self hostable 3D file host­ing sys­tem, is using F3D. Mag­i­cal­ly the lat­est release of Many­fold by default will ren­der an image pre­view of any FreeCAD files placed on a Many­fold instance. Isn’t it great when open source stuff all works well together!

Mas­sive thanks and kudos to the F3D team for includ­ing FreeCAD file ren­der­ing in their devel­op­ment roadmap.