I’m in need of a CAD program with an easy aproach for someone with zero experience on this type of software.
3D printing is not a concern
I intend to draw the blueprints for my house. The building is old, no blueprints exist for it, and I intend to make renovations to it, so having blueprints to work on to plan the renovations will be a huge help.
Look at QCad. They have a paid ($40), and a free version that is fully functional and open source. It’s the most autocad-like app out there, so learning that has the advantage of learning the UI of autocad too.
LibreCad that others suggested was forked from Qcad about 15 years ago and hasn’t moved much in terms of features. While QCad has. So in my opinion, it’s the best solution.
Then there’s Freecad, but that’s more about 3D cad, and it’s more complicated overall.
I’m in need of a CAD program with an easy aproach for someone with zero experience on this type of software.
If you have zero experience with CAD, but some experience with programming languages or things like LaTeX, JSON, XML, HTML, etc., I’d suggest giving OpenSCAD a try. While it is definitely for more advanced users, it managed to instantly click with me, in contrast to FreeCAD and others I just couldn’t get into (or rather back into, since my AutoCAD lessons back in school >20 years ago). That it allowed me to work work on CAD drawings in Emacs helped too…
openscad is kind of a bad choice for architectural drawings.
So far I used SweetHome3D, Onshape and Qelectrotech (for electrical) for the renovation of my house.
However if you are planning to do some heavy renovations in your house I would advise you to get an architect to do a proper blueprint of your house and a blueprint of what your house would look like after renovation.
It’s not necessary, it might feel like it’s extra money up front that you don’t use directly for renovation but in a big project you save so much in the long term. This is what we did and there is so many (expensive) mistakes that we avoided because we had an expert eye at the beginning of the project.
I understand your concern and advice.
My house was built using a logic that only the outter walls, which are stone on the ground floor and cement block on the top floor, are load bearing.
These will not be touched, besides removing and replacing old mortars.
On the inside, all the walls are for show, made of wood I want to reclaim and a couple that were built in clay bricks but that have no load bearing capability nor structural role.
Drawing the blueprints as the house exists today will serve to have a birds eye view of the house to work on, even with professionals, if the need arises in the future.
This sort of house is not considered interesting for professionals in my area; the structure is too simple and can not accomodate that many changes. And because I’m not rebuilding but just renewing, no projects, licenses or consultancy is required. This makes this kind of job not very appealing.
And thank you for reminding me that electrical and water plants are a thing, aswell.
If it’s 2D then use AutoCAD on the web.
I think everyone’s got the CAD/3D programs covered, so a slightly “out there” answer:
If you’re just doing 2D blueprints for yourself, do you actually just need a 2D vector program for doing a scale drawing with measurements?
I’ve done a lot of floorplans / layouts/ site maps etc using Inkscape, for instance.
It depends on exactly what you’re wanting out the other end - so you may be lacking a lot of the features in a full CAD program, but the learning curve is comparatively so shallow that you might have a working plan by the end of the day, rather than the end of the month.
That could be an option. I need/want to put blueprints on digital format to facilitate editing in order to plan renovations. I could do all the work by hand on paper but it would be an hassle every time a change or idea needed to be tried out on the floor plan.
It’s not perfect, but for that stuff, I’d use SweetHome3D.
Don’t know about its current state but this helped me a lot with moving out to a new place, years ago. The version how I remember wouldn’t be so helpful with renovations I think. Still can be used as placeholder though.
FreeCAD is great for 3D CAD models but not that great for CAD drawings
If you only need 2D, there is LibreCAD.
I never tried it, because it is 2d only: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.dubstar_04.design
A native GNOME solution. Wasn’t expecting that one.
Wow, this looks nice!
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Onshape has a free tier, though all the cad files you make in it are publically available. That being said, it’s easy to use and, since it’s browser based, completely comparable with linux
For all the obvious reasons, I’d like to keep my house blueprints off the public domain.
If you want to do accurate calculations, wall thickness, exact angles, window sizes etc., I would recommend FreeCAD, especially the draft workbench and possibly the BIM workbench if you want to go 3D afterwards.
Tutorial FreeCAD draft workbench (2D): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODEeqtepOwA
Tutorial FreeCAD BIM workbench (3D) as a follow-up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZHyUBfdgJA
If you are more looking for a rough planning where you can test furniture placements, floor designs and see fast results, I recommend The Sims 4 (no joke!). The base game is free (also available on Steam) and it’s quite easy and intuitive to move stuff around, change a wall, place decorations etc.
Unusual solution but I can see it working! Most definetely.
But I do require some degree of accuracy on what I intend to do, so FreeCAD is lining up be the best solution, taking from the answer I’m getting.
The house is old and drawing an as much as humanly possible accurate blueprint would be a plus. And I do have some very weird angles in it.
I currently switch a lot between FreeCAD and Sims. When I brainstorm with my girlfriend we either use a simple drawing programm or Sims. Then, once we aligned on an idea, I use FreeCAD to bring in accuracy. Quite often then the original ideas don’t work out because of wall thickness, window placement etc.
What are you running FreeCAD on? I have tried it on 4-5 different systems and it has ran like shit on all of them. Like I don’t expect it to be perfect but it took 30-90 seconds to even respond when I try to do something. That’s completely unusable. I finished an entire (fairly simple) design I was working on in Fusion360 before I could even get 2 rectangles sketched out in FreeCad. I’d love to get it working because it’s one of my bigger hangups getting rid of windows.
I never had these kind of performance issues at all. I use it on three different ThinkPads, all not too bad but also no crazy hardware. The cheapest should be an E14 with a AMD 5500U and 16 GB of RAM that was around 500€ 4 years ago.
Isn’t Fusion360 cloud-based? If so, it doesn’t make too much sense to compare the performance on a certain hardware.
My understanding is fusion360 only does some things in the cloud. It still runs locally. Otherwise they could have a web app I could use on my Linux desktop and not worry about it. I was using them side by side on two separate workstations (the one with FreeCAD actually has higher specs) and I wasn’t really trying to compare performance but when it’s that glaring of a difference it can’t just come down to hardware and like I said it wasn’t just “slower” it was completely unusuable. I tried FreeCAD on the system I use Fusion360 on as well with similar results to everything else I’ve tried it on.
Okay, that’s strange. When you say workstations, I assume that you had pretty decent hardware and probably more powerful than my consumer notebook. I usually don’t notice lags or load times > 1 second. If I do a complex operation like mass-cloning an object via a polar pattern, I have to wait for 2 or 3 seconds but really nothing that bothered me in the workflow. Definitely never anything close to a minute as you described.
If you want to give FreeCAD another chance one day and still experience the same issues, maybe bring it up in the official forums. The experts there might have an idea what could be wrong.
I don’t think the creators of the Sims designed the game with that in mind but if works, it is not stupid.
Qcad is a good one for drawing blueprints
Sketchup 2022 works flawlessly. Arch
Toyed a bit with Sketchup before Google got their claws on it. Abandoned it after it happened.
I think it became a browser based solution at some point?
Pro is still the same desktop app
Not in the mood to pay for a solution that a FOSS program may cover as well, considering it won’t be used for professional purposes.
For what you are doing SketchUp might be the best tool. Its easy to work with and good with architectural stuff.
SketchUp was intended for this purpose and is so incredibly easy to get started with.
Unless something has changed, it definitely is for sketching only, as it lacks a lot of advanced functionality found in other CAD programs.
