I’m in need of a CAD program with an easy aproach for someone with zero experience on this type of software.
3D printing is not a concern
I intend to draw the blueprints for my house. The building is old, no blueprints exist for it, and I intend to make renovations to it, so having blueprints to work on to plan the renovations will be a huge help.
So far I used SweetHome3D, Onshape and Qelectrotech (for electrical) for the renovation of my house.
However if you are planning to do some heavy renovations in your house I would advise you to get an architect to do a proper blueprint of your house and a blueprint of what your house would look like after renovation.
It’s not necessary, it might feel like it’s extra money up front that you don’t use directly for renovation but in a big project you save so much in the long term. This is what we did and there is so many (expensive) mistakes that we avoided because we had an expert eye at the beginning of the project.
I understand your concern and advice.
My house was built using a logic that only the outter walls, which are stone on the ground floor and cement block on the top floor, are load bearing.
These will not be touched, besides removing and replacing old mortars.
On the inside, all the walls are for show, made of wood I want to reclaim and a couple that were built in clay bricks but that have no load bearing capability nor structural role.
Drawing the blueprints as the house exists today will serve to have a birds eye view of the house to work on, even with professionals, if the need arises in the future.
This sort of house is not considered interesting for professionals in my area; the structure is too simple and can not accomodate that many changes. And because I’m not rebuilding but just renewing, no projects, licenses or consultancy is required. This makes this kind of job not very appealing.
And thank you for reminding me that electrical and water plants are a thing, aswell.
FreeCAD is the most common solid FOSS modeler. I do not think any solid modeling system is that simple. They tend to need training and continuous use. That was my experience with SolidWorks and NX anyway.
Learning and using it don’t are barriers.
I could draw the blueprints by hand, on paper, but doing it in a digital format will make it easier to edit, review, etc.
I’ll check FreeCAD.
FreeCAD is pretty capable but it’s openly 3D focused and doesn’t make for a great 2D only solution. However, for some simple work with remodeling, it might be fine.
The draft workbench ans sketcher workbench in FreeCAD are both only for 2D projects.
Sketcher is used as the first step for an extrusion iirc but draft is what he wants. It is just more built for 3D models to be turned into drafts rather than making a draft from scratch.
Look at QCad. They have a paid ($40), and a free version that is fully functional and open source. It’s the most autocad-like app out there, so learning that has the advantage of learning the UI of autocad too.
LibreCad that others suggested was forked from Qcad about 15 years ago and hasn’t moved much in terms of features. While QCad has. So in my opinion, it’s the best solution.
Then there’s Freecad, but that’s more about 3D cad, and it’s more complicated overall.
If it’s 2D then use AutoCAD on the web.
I never tried it, because it is 2d only: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.dubstar_04.design
A native GNOME solution. Wasn’t expecting that one.
Wow, this looks nice!
It’s not perfect, but for that stuff, I’d use SweetHome3D.
Don’t know about its current state but this helped me a lot with moving out to a new place, years ago. The version how I remember wouldn’t be so helpful with renovations I think. Still can be used as placeholder though.
I think everyone’s got the CAD/3D programs covered, so a slightly “out there” answer:
If you’re just doing 2D blueprints for yourself, do you actually just need a 2D vector program for doing a scale drawing with measurements?
I’ve done a lot of floorplans / layouts/ site maps etc using Inkscape, for instance.
It depends on exactly what you’re wanting out the other end - so you may be lacking a lot of the features in a full CAD program, but the learning curve is comparatively so shallow that you might have a working plan by the end of the day, rather than the end of the month.
That could be an option. I need/want to put blueprints on digital format to facilitate editing in order to plan renovations. I could do all the work by hand on paper but it would be an hassle every time a change or idea needed to be tried out on the floor plan.
For what you are doing SketchUp might be the best tool. Its easy to work with and good with architectural stuff.
SketchUp was intended for this purpose and is so incredibly easy to get started with.
Unless something has changed, it definitely is for sketching only, as it lacks a lot of advanced functionality found in other CAD programs.
I did something similar recently, old house, wanted floor plans for renovation / idea generation.
Initially I started with FreeCAD and used the BIM functionaly, worked well, but a few bugs at time.
I’ve done a few smaller scale models of some rooms recently in [Bonsai](https://bonsaibim.org/(formerly BlenderBIM), and found the process a little more pleasent. This could be due to my previous blender experience and the hotkeys being more on my bones.
I respect Blender very much but I’m also aware it requires a very deep dive to manage to use at minimum. So, as much as I can, I’ll avoid it.
If you want to do accurate calculations, wall thickness, exact angles, window sizes etc., I would recommend FreeCAD, especially the draft workbench and possibly the BIM workbench if you want to go 3D afterwards.
Tutorial FreeCAD draft workbench (2D): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODEeqtepOwA
Tutorial FreeCAD BIM workbench (3D) as a follow-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZHyUBfdgJA
If you are more looking for a rough planning where you can test furniture placements, floor designs and see fast results, I recommend The Sims 4 (no joke!). The base game is free (also available on Steam) and it’s quite easy and intuitive to move stuff around, change a wall, place decorations etc.
Unusual solution but I can see it working! Most definetely.
But I do require some degree of accuracy on what I intend to do, so FreeCAD is lining up be the best solution, taking from the answer I’m getting.
The house is old and drawing an as much as humanly possible accurate blueprint would be a plus. And I do have some very weird angles in it.
I currently switch a lot between FreeCAD and Sims. When I brainstorm with my girlfriend we either use a simple drawing programm or Sims. Then, once we aligned on an idea, I use FreeCAD to bring in accuracy. Quite often then the original ideas don’t work out because of wall thickness, window placement etc.
I don’t think the creators of the Sims designed the game with that in mind but if works, it is not stupid.
What are you running FreeCAD on? I have tried it on 4-5 different systems and it has ran like shit on all of them. Like I don’t expect it to be perfect but it took 30-90 seconds to even respond when I try to do something. That’s completely unusable. I finished an entire (fairly simple) design I was working on in Fusion360 before I could even get 2 rectangles sketched out in FreeCad. I’d love to get it working because it’s one of my bigger hangups getting rid of windows.
I never had these kind of performance issues at all. I use it on three different ThinkPads, all not too bad but also no crazy hardware. The cheapest should be an E14 with a AMD 5500U and 16 GB of RAM that was around 500€ 4 years ago.
Isn’t Fusion360 cloud-based? If so, it doesn’t make too much sense to compare the performance on a certain hardware.
My understanding is fusion360 only does some things in the cloud. It still runs locally. Otherwise they could have a web app I could use on my Linux desktop and not worry about it. I was using them side by side on two separate workstations (the one with FreeCAD actually has higher specs) and I wasn’t really trying to compare performance but when it’s that glaring of a difference it can’t just come down to hardware and like I said it wasn’t just “slower” it was completely unusuable. I tried FreeCAD on the system I use Fusion360 on as well with similar results to everything else I’ve tried it on.
Some good ol pen and paper or some kolourpaint
I could but it would be a hassle to draw from scratch an entire blueprint every time some idea came to us to improve the space. Hence, the digital option.
Was a bit of a joke answer but pen and paper did work for people in the good ol days.
I took it as a good humoured take ad I answered it in the same fashion.
I could, in fact, draw the entire thing on paper. Technical drawing was taugh to me in school and I took quite well to it; I still like to draw today but more as an artistic expression.
Although I wouldn’t consider what I make as artistic under any light.
But my original still holds. Yes, I could. But I would have to make everything from scratch every single time we wanted to try an idea.
Not really practical.
I’m going to look into LibreCAD and FreeCAD. Seem to be the most promising solutions.
It’s not terrible advice tbh, even just hand sketches are solid for getting ideas down, makes it easy to translate to cad. It at least helps me think things through and the like.
Get a few pencils with different leads (some harder stuff like 2-4H and an HB) and some nice paper and you’re good, but really anything works, totally have a mockup of my garage on a whiteboard planning where I want to put stuff.
As for cad packages, freecad, as far as I’m aware there are some architecture workbench plugins, and there’s a tech drawing workbench. Coming back to cad after a while I found it super easy to pick back up (coming from solidworks at least)
I’m in need of a CAD program with an easy aproach for someone with zero experience on this type of software.
If you have zero experience with CAD, but some experience with programming languages or things like LaTeX, JSON, XML, HTML, etc., I’d suggest giving OpenSCAD a try. While it is definitely for more advanced users, it managed to instantly click with me, in contrast to FreeCAD and others I just couldn’t get into (or rather back into, since my AutoCAD lessons back in school >20 years ago). That it allowed me to work work on CAD drawings in Emacs helped too…
openscad is kind of a bad choice for architectural drawings.
Sketchup 2022 works flawlessly. Arch
Toyed a bit with Sketchup before Google got their claws on it. Abandoned it after it happened.
I think it became a browser based solution at some point?
Pro is still the same desktop app
pirate solidworks. fuck dassault systemes, but they make a damned good cad program, with excellent documentation on how to do just about everything under the sun (and some stuff that even the sun don’t shine on)
use a win10 ltsc VM with device passthru for running it, it won’t know the difference.
I respect the spirit but no. You made me smile, nonetheless. But why resort to windows plus a pirated software?
It may very well be a very good solution, perhaps even the best, but it’s not what I want to support, even if indirectly.
you don’t need windows, but that is how I have my install set up, as WINE can be kind of buggy with the program. it doesn’t need networking, so no risk of m$ taking info, and SW2024 can run on 8GB and some CPU passthrough.
speaking as someone who’s tried just about ever 3dCAD program under the sun, SW is the best on the market for ease of use, documentation, and available plugins.
openSCAD is absolute hell for ease-of-use, onshape sells your data, freecad has the same issues as openscad, and AutoCAD, while good, still is worse than SW due to poorer documentation, and more annoying interface.
of course, there is always the option of doing the drawings by hand on paper, with a ruler, a compass, and a protractor. this may be your best option for sharability, as your local municipality may want to have it for their records as well, assuming that a) they don’t already have it, and b) if they do, you were unable to procure the original blueprints.
They don’t. :) First place I asked. The house is so old it still falls under a exemption to have blueprints deposited at the municipality. In fact, it wasn’t even built with blueprints.
damn, that thing must be like, a Scottish castle or something LOL.
super cool that you live there!
now I’m confused about onshape though, as anything digital that’s “free” has long since enshittefied, and sold you as the product… could the seriously be one of the last bastions of good free software? it may not be OSS, but if its really that good… hmmm, food for thought. I’ll have to do more research on it.
SolidWorks isn’t the right tool for 2D. And if it was, Onshape has a free tier.
its the right tool for everything engineering related; you can do drafting very easily, its built-in.
onshape may have a free tier, but piracy is better than free, due to “free” meaning that your information is the product being sold (to other vendors).
I’ve used SolidWorks for over 20 years, it is NOT the right tool for 2D layouts. That’s what Draftsight was for, before they killed it.
You pirate away, good luck with trojans and viruses. I’ll use Onshape.
Qcad is a good one for drawing blueprints
