FreeCAD Blog By MangoJelly Solutions

Check out Jan Jindra on the FreeCAD Facebook group . He's has been on his travels around Czechia where he has been photographing, modelling and 3D printing these amazing watch towers. The Czech Republic has the most lookout towers than any country in the world. Boasting an amazing 300 plus (and counting). These magnificent buildings serve as one of the main local tourist attractions, and best still, majority are even free to visit by the public! As the construction of these towers run through history, from the late 19th century and through both World Wars they hold a large historical importance; a window into this beautiful countries past. But visiting them all doesn't mean you can tick this treat off your bucket list, the numbers are still growing as in recent years modern constructions have been erected. After capture Jan uses standard tools in FreeCAD to model the structures. He later 3D prints these capturing there spectacular form in a miniature. Here are some examples ...

This is a quick tutorial of how to make organic structures in FreeCAD's curves workbench. Inspired from the original Rhino 3D tutorials I created that may be somewhere on the internet (it's been a long time!) I have taken inspiration from the curve tweeting tool which creates intermediate copies of the curve by dividing two supplied curves into an equal number of points, finds the midpoint between the corresponding points on the curves. and interpolates the tween curve through those points. At time of writing FreeCAD doesn't have this feature but we can get a similar result using the iso curves. Here's the process: 1. Create a sketch with two curves, individual sketches could be used but the Curves WB can be used to extract and move both curves. Think of this just as a template. 2. Go to the Curves workbench and select one curve and click the join curve tool or from the top menu; Curves >join curves. Repeat for the second curve, note: the newly created join curve may...