Configure the grid and working plane, Text and Dimension settings to your liking in menu Edit → Preferences → Draft.

As in all technical drawing applications, it is wise to set up your environment correctly, it will save you a lot of time.

To showcase the workflow and possibilities of the Draft Workbench, we will walk through a simple exercise, the result of which will be this little drawing, showing the floor plan of a small house that contains only a kitchen top (A pretty absurd floor plan, but we can do what we want here, can't we?):

All its tools work in the whole 3D space and many of the Draft tools, for example Move or Rotate, are commonly used all over FreeCAD because they are often more intuitive than changing placement parameters manually.Īmong the tools offered by the Draft Workbench, you will find traditional drawing tools like Line, Circle, or Wire (polyline), modification tools like Move, Rotate or Offset, a working plane/grid system that allows you to define precisely in which plane you are working, and a complete snapping system that makes it very easy to draw and position elements precisely in relation to each other. The Draft Workbench, although it adopts ways of working inherited from the traditional 2D CAD world, is not limited at all to the 2D realm. In any case, FreeCAD features a more traditional workbench, with tools found in most 2D CAD applications: The Draft Workbench.

Or you already know something about design, or you prefer to draw things before building them. You might be interested by FreeCAD because you already have some technical drawing experience, for example with software like AutoCAD.

Freecad 2d cad software