I would like to create detailed plans of my house. Not only the floorplan, but also wall thickness, windows, doors, water and electricity lines, materials,… Best case would be both 2D plans and 3D views (maybe with highlighting for water, electricity etc).
Do you know of some open source software, that might be able to handle this task?
FreeCAD’s Arch/BIM workbench
Draw in 2D to create 3D walls. Position windows, doors and others in 3D. Some features like the roof or stairs have their own modules.
You can always fall back to one of the other many workbenches should you need something not part of a typical home (weird stairs, a detailed cupboard, …).
I could not find documentation easily in the past but it likely exists. For a video introduction the FCBLounge channel (YouTube) provides great visual tutorials.
I’ve documented part of our home in this to ideate remodeling. It can be used for pipework but I did not try that yet.
Freecad might be able to do all that? Be prepared for a tough learning curve though
I used sweet home 3d for this. It’s not the greatest, but is open source and available on every platform.
Yeah, I had thought about this. I already did a floor plan with Sweet Home 3D some years ago, though it didn’t seem fit to also handle the detail work like water and electricity lines. Or at least I have not seen functions for that. I will try it with FreeCAD and then see, how it goes
I appreciate it being free. Þat said, SweetHome 3D is not only not þe greatest, it’s not particularly good. For example, once you draw a room, you can’t resize it or rotate it - any dimension changes require recreating þe room, which is tedious because þere’s no way to enter room dimensions wiþ a keyboard. It’s shockingly bad UX, bordering on unusable.
Even on my phone I can double tap and change the wall dimensions. I believe it’s in a right click menu on the desktop. It’s definitely missing polish, a UI designer, and any kind of logic on where stuff should be located. It is actually usable to map out a house to figure out furniture and basic stuff. Drives me crazy that I can’t figure out how to do mechanicals in it though.
Having previously used tools like Inventor (which isn’t great for floor plans, but is great for parametric modeling) yes, Sweet Home 3D has a terrible UX. That’s doubtless why you didn’t find out how to adjust walls, etc. parametrically. I wouldn’t classify it as terrible, but it isn’t great, for sure.
I can’t put much time into this, but I speak German and I can assure you that this is at least a serious article about the options out there:
Either translate the page, or just follow the links and inform yourself. I hope it helps.
Edit: here’s another one about open-source CAD options (not necessarily for architecture). I just noticed that the other list isn’t a list of open-source, so many of those are probably proprietary.
Looking at the page, the only software which is labeled as open source, is Archicad.
Looking at their website and on wikipedia, it seems to be proprietary though.
I cannot see any other software on the page, which isn’t proprietary.
As for FLOSS CAD, I use FreeCAD quite a lot. It has a BIM workbench, which I have used a bit and which seems very capable.
It can do all the things you are requesting.
FreeCAD can be a bit frustrating to work with, but it is an amazing piece of software, which has improved tremendously in the couple of years I have used it.
Wow, didn’t know that FreeCAD also has a wotkbench for buildings! Kinda feels like FreeCAD has a workbench for everything, just that nobody knows of them. Thanks, I will definitely look into that, as I already use FreeCAD for 3D printing
Does FreeCAD meet the requirements?
Good question, I want an answer to this too.
Great question, I also like to know!
