84113fbd17
Extend the work from #3496 to allow the safe optimization of more complex step transitions. - Use the actual safePDC path for short step transitions and breaks, currently up to 2 cutter diameters. This value is chosen to cover basically all typical end step-overs, including those with heavy skew. Extending this much further (up to the break even point for a retract & rapid) will need some careful thinking for multi pass paths. - Coordinate offset tolerances with per-operation tessellation tolerances, to avoid tessellation artifacts messing up paths by causing false retracts. Such retracts can cause entire steps near vertical areas to be falsely skipped, which would cause a major deviation from the target model. By considering per-job tolerances, we allow users to safely save computational resources by computing roughing operations with lower precision, or selectively increase precision for finish passes. - Refine the default tessellation tolerance to GeometryTolerance / 4. This makes sure that the job GeometryTolerance is respected by operation defaults.
Your own 3D parametric modeler
Website • Documentation • Forum • Bug tracker • Git repository
This project receives generous infrastructure support from
Overview
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Freedom to build what you want FreeCAD is an open-source parametric 3D modeler made primarily to design real-life objects of any size. Parametric modeling allows you to easily modify your design by going back into your model history and changing its parameters.
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Create 3D from 2D & back FreeCAD allows you to sketch geometry constrained 2D shapes and use them as a base to build other objects. It contains many components to adjust dimensions or extract design details from 3D models to create high quality production ready drawings.
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Designed for your needs FreeCAD is designed to fit a wide range of uses including product design, mechanical engineering and architecture. Whether you are a hobbyist, a programmer, an experienced CAD user, a student or a teacher, you will feel right at home with FreeCAD.
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Cross platform FreeCAD runs on Windows, Mac and Linux
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Underlying technology
- OpenCASCADE A powerful geometry kernel, the most important component of FreeCAD
- Coin3D library Open Inventor-compliant 3D scene representation model
- Python FreeCAD offers a broad Python API
- Qt Graphical User Interface built with Qt
Installing
Precompiled (installable) packages are available for Windows and Mac on the Releases page.
On most Linux distributions, FreeCAD is directly installable from the software center application.
Other options are described at the wiki Download page.
Build Status 
| Master | 0.18 | Translation |
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Compiling
Compiling FreeCAD requires installation of several libraries and their development files such as OpenCASCADe, Coin and Qt, listed in the pages below. Once this is done, FreeCAD can be simply compiled with cMake. On Windows, these libraries are bundled and offered by the FreeCAD team in a convenient package. On Linux, they are usually found in your distribution's repositories, and on Mac OSX and other platforms you will usually need to compile them yourself.
The pages below contain up-to-date build instructions:
Usage & Getting help
The FreeCAD wiki contains documentation on general FreeCAD usage, Python scripting, and development. These pages might help you get started:
The FreeCAD forum is also a great place to find help and solve specific problems you might encounter when learning to use FreeCAD.