Gemini64, thank you for the short breakdown on exportable file formats and which program opens which. You may also find that the latest “unstable” version of FreeCAD actually runs better than the “stable” v. For best results, select your working plane before using the Dimension tool. It has better snapping (OSnap), it is a little buggy but still much more useful than the measurement tool. I find it’s easier to use the Dimension tool in the Draft workbench. When selecting a point, make sure you click and release the mouse button, then click again to select the next point. The current measurement tool has very limited use because all it can do is give a straight distance between 2 points. In freeCAD, I use the blue measuring tape icon, click a point, go the next point and then it deselects the first point once I select the second point, and on and on. I feel like an idiot admitting it, but I can’t figure out how to take a dimension in freeCAD so I can redraw the parts in Autocad. So you just need to export a FCStd file to STEP from FreeCAD, import it in Inventor and export it back to a file format that AutoCAD recognizes. Since 3D data in DWG and DXF is embedded in ACIS format, it cannot be read or written by FreeCAD, I think it can only import/export the mesh data that a 3D DWG file includes.īut you have access to Inventor, and unlike AutoCAD it does support STEP and IGES. It has limited DXF and DWG compatibility (the latter through the use of the Teigha Converter, a free commercial program that has to be installed separately as including it in FreeCAD would be a license violation). They prefer to restrain their users’ liberty by offering only undisclosed proprietary file formats like DWG, DXF or ACIS (*.sat).įreeCAD being open source, it cannot license existing commercial translator libraries. The problem is that AutoCAD cannot import either of those, through Autodesk’s own fault. iges) and STEP (.stp, *.step), the latter being an ISO standard. You degrade your model when you export it to STL, and it’s a one-way trip.įreeCAD can export to open CAD formats such as IGES (*.igs. STL is a mesh format as as such can only be considered an output-only format for CAD software, or what I call “garbage out”.
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