I work as an architectural designer but I've never really been allowed to use anything other than Revit for BIM workflows. Our consultants basically only use Revit or Autodesk products, so our hands are kind of tied for projects where we need to collaborate.

My boss uses Vectorworks for our small projects that don't need BIM, I might suggest we switch to Libre or FreeCAD so that we all have access without needed another VW license. Do you enjoy using LibreCAD?

[–] 7fb2adfb45bafcc01c80@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I like LibreCAD, but it's a little too simple sometimes. I miss the power of AutoCAD, but I don't miss its price.

Three things I want are

being able to assign heights to objects and do 3D stuff
being able to assign labels to objects (instead of circle3761 I'd like to call it 'fountain' or something)
splines are really finicky, and you can't do things like a fillet on more complex objects

It took a couple of days to get used to and probably a week of use before I was 100% comfortable, but I find that it meets most of my needs now.

[–] archomrade@midwest.social 2 points 4 days ago

I imagine both Libre and Free are open-sourced and easily modifiable? I haven't looked into it, but if it's anything like Rhino there should be a standard way of writing custom plugins that should close the gap on some of those - at least the object naming would be easy.

I'll look into them though, thanks! BIM software is such a pain in the ass to work with and one of the most expensive design software I know of, I think open sourced projects would be amazing for BIM if they took off like FreeCAD did

[–] grapemix@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 days ago

Plz keep us update on your thoughts, progress, etc. There has very few posts on this topic.