Drawing Workbench

The Drawing module is made to allow you to put your 3D work on paper. That is, to put views of your models in a 2D window, and to insert that window in a drawing, for example a sheet, with a border, a title and your logo, and finally to print that sheet. The Drawing module is currently under construction and more or less a tecnology preview!



In the picture you see the main concepts of the Drawing module. The document contains a Shape object (Schenkel) which we want to extract to a drawing. Therefore a "Page" was created. A page gets instantiated through a template. In this case A3_Landscape. The Template is a SVG document which holds frames, logos and complies to some kind of standard.

In this page we can insert one or more views. Each view has a position on the page (Properties X,Y), a scale factor (Property scale) and additional properties. Every time the page or the view or the referenced object changes, the page gets regenerated and the page display updated.

Scripting
At the moment the end user workflows are very limited. So maybe the scripting is more interesting.

import Part, Drawing Part.show(Part.makeBox(100,100,100).cut(Part.makeCylinder(80,100)).cut(Part.makeBox(90,40,100)).cut(Part.makeBox(20,85,100))) Shape = App.ActiveDocument.Shape.Shape [visibly,hidden] = Drawing.project(Shape) print "visible edges:", len(visibly.Edges) print "hidden edges:", len(hidden.Edges) print "Bnd Box shape: X=",Shape.BoundBox.XLength," Y=",Shape.BoundBox.YLength," Z=",Shape.BoundBox.ZLength print "Bnd Box project: X=",visibly.BoundBox.XLength," Y=",visibly.BoundBox.YLength," Z=",visibly.BoundBox.ZLength App.activeDocument.addObject('Drawing::FeaturePage','Page') App.activeDocument.Page.Template = 'C:/_SW-Projects/Privat/FreeCAD/FreeCAD_0.9_VC8/Mod/Drawing/Templates/A3_Landscape.svg' App.activeDocument.addObject('Drawing::FeatureViewPart','View') App.activeDocument.View.Source = App.activeDocument.Shape App.activeDocument.View.Direction = (0.0,0.0,1.0) App.activeDocument.View.X = 10.0 App.activeDocument.View.Y = 10.0 App.activeDocument.View.Scale = 1.0 App.activeDocument.Page.addObject(App.activeDocument.View) App.activeDocument.addObject('Drawing::FeatureViewPart','View1') App.activeDocument.View1.Source = App.activeDocument.Shape App.activeDocument.View1.Direction = (0.0,0.0,1.0) App.activeDocument.View1.X = 190.0 App.activeDocument.View1.Y = 30.0 App.activeDocument.View1.Scale = 1.0 App.activeDocument.Page.addObject(App.activeDocument.View1) App.activeDocument.recompute App.activeDocument.View.X = 30.0 App.activeDocument.View.Y = 30.0 App.activeDocument.View.Scale = 1.5 App.activeDocument.recompute ViewSVG = App.activeDocument.View.ViewResult print ViewSVG print "Resulting SVG document: ",App.activeDocument.Page.PageResult file = open(App.activeDocument.Page.PageResult,"r") print "Result page is ",len(file.readlines)," lines long" del file App.activeDocument.addObject('Drawing::FeatureView','View2') App.activeDocument.View2.ViewResult = """   """ App.activeDocument.Page.addObject(App.activeDocument.View2) App.activeDocument.recompute del Shape
 * 1) create a small sample part
 * 1) direct projection
 * 1) all was projected on the Z-plane:
 * 1) And now the parametric way:
 * 1) insert a Page object and assign a template
 * 1) create a view on the "Shape" object, define the position and scale and assign it to a Page
 * 1) create a second view on the same object:
 * 1) change something and update:
 * 1) Accessing the bits and peaces:
 * 2) get the SVG fragment of a single view
 * 1) get the hole result page (its a file in the document temp dir, only read allowed)
 * 1) important, give free the file!
 * 1) insert a view with your own content:

That leads to following result: