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submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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.

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[-] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

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...

[-] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago

openscad is kind of a bad choice for architectural drawings.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago
[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago

It's not perfect, but for that stuff, I'd use SweetHome3D.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago
[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

A native GNOME solution. Wasn't expecting that one.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Wow, this looks nice!

[-] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago
[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

FreeCAD is great for 3D CAD models but not that great for CAD drawings

[-] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago

If you only need 2D, there is LibreCAD.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I don't think the creators of the Sims designed the game with that in mind but if works, it is not stupid.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 15 hours ago

Some good ol pen and paper or some kolourpaint

[-] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago

I could but it would be a hassle to draw from scratch an entire blueprint every time some idea came to us to improve the space. Hence, the digital option.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

Was a bit of a joke answer but pen and paper did work for people in the good ol days.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

I took it as a good humoured take ad I answered it in the same fashion.

I could, in fact, draw the entire thing on paper. Technical drawing was taugh to me in school and I took quite well to it; I still like to draw today but more as an artistic expression.

Although I wouldn't consider what I make as artistic under any light.

But my original still holds. Yes, I could. But I would have to make everything from scratch every single time we wanted to try an idea.

Not really practical.

I'm going to look into LibreCAD and FreeCAD. Seem to be the most promising solutions.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

It's not terrible advice tbh, even just hand sketches are solid for getting ideas down, makes it easy to translate to cad. It at least helps me think things through and the like.

Get a few pencils with different leads (some harder stuff like 2-4H and an HB) and some nice paper and you're good, but really anything works, totally have a mockup of my garage on a whiteboard planning where I want to put stuff.

As for cad packages, freecad, as far as I'm aware there are some architecture workbench plugins, and there's a tech drawing workbench. Coming back to cad after a while I found it super easy to pick back up (coming from solidworks at least)

[-] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

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

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

For all the obvious reasons, I'd like to keep my house blueprints off the public domain.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Qcad is a good one for drawing blueprints

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Sketchup 2022 works flawlessly. Arch

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

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?

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

For what you are doing SketchUp might be the best tool. Its easy to work with and good with architectural stuff.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I did something similar recently, old house, wanted floor plans for renovation / idea generation.

Initially I started with FreeCAD and used the BIM functionaly, worked well, but a few bugs at time.

I've done a few smaller scale models of some rooms recently in [Bonsai](https://bonsaibim.org/(formerly BlenderBIM), and found the process a little more pleasent. This could be due to my previous blender experience and the hotkeys being more on my bones.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

I respect Blender very much but I'm also aware it requires a very deep dive to manage to use at minimum. So, as much as I can, I'll avoid it.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 18 hours ago

I think you'd be surprised, the on ramp I would say is easier than FreeCAD.

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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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