At this point it seem appropriate for me to pause and gain more familiarity with some of the more basic terms and concepts, not only of FreeCAD but of this field in general. But for more complex operations, that depend inherently on how the solid is built, like making a length larger, or removing fillets, etc., it may not be as easy. For simple boolean operations, like adding material, or cutting material, it may be possible to import and do the operations that you want.
So, what you want is possible, but it really depends on what you want to do.
Step to stl online workbench full#
However, to have full control of the appearance of the solid, the best recommendation would be to remodel the imported solid in FreeCAD, then you can manipulate every single detail of it. If you have a STEP file, you basically have a starting solid, which you can modify by boolean operations ( Part_Boolean), like cuts and fusions. But still, a STEP file is only a format for defining a solid object, it still is not a FreeCAD "object", so it won't have all the parametric information needed to modify it fully with FreeCAD tools. STEP is a widely used interchange format, supported by basically all CAD systems, so you should use STEP to exchange information between different CAD applications. To be able to modify object with FreeCAD, you better have solid objects, like STEP files.įreeCAD's native format is BREP, a type used by the internal geometrical kernel OpenCASCADE Technology (OCCT). You basically have to move individual points to change them. STLs are meshes, so they are basically just collection of points and triangular faces, but they don't have any sort of parametric information that allows modifying them. In this sense, an STL is the worst type of file type that you can use. You won't have complete control of that object unless you are able to fully transform that object into a FreeCAD object. However, when you import an object from a different program, that program will use its own object type. This is possible because FreeCAD objects have underlying information behind them. Every time you change these properties, the solid body is recalculated and its shape is updated on screen. This means that the geometrical elements that you see on screen are objects that can change depending on the properties (parameters) that you modify (length, width, height, thickness, distance, number of points, etc.). The part file is too large to attach, oddly, and I could not find a suitable online stash for it.
I thought a sketch might fix that problem but when I created a sketch it gave no errors but does say "empty sketch".
Starting out I saved the part as an STL file, and managed to create a solid, but find I cannot really interact with it, for instance to edit the size of various bits of the part. I created a rather simple part in SoldidWorks, but find it a bit frustrating to work with, especially as with my limited version I often wait weeks for an answer. I'm still very much a novice at design and FreeCAD. If it is not a realistic expectation, the rest of this probably is not worth reading. Hoping I simply did something wrong and it is possible to import and edit a part made with another program.
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