Author Archives: Michael Altfield

About Michael Altfield

Michael Altfield founded Eco-Libre in 2023

Optimizing Expanded Metal Mesh in FreeCAD

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This guide will show how to model sheets of Expanded Metal in FreeCAD, without slowing (or killing) FreeCAD.

Optimizing Expanded Metal in FreeCAD

In our last guide, we looked at how to get a granular view of the size (in bytes) of each layer in a FreeCAD file — so we could figure out which object was causing the file to be so large and slow. We found that 90% of the file’s (uncompressed) MemSize was being caused by just one item: a 95 cm x 68 cm sheet of Expanded Metal.

A photo of a small sheet of expanded metal
Expanded Metal (source). Expanded metal is a type of sheet metal which has been cut and stretched to form a regular pattern (often diamond-shaped) of mesh-like material (source)

Unfortunately, rendering mesh objects (like Expanded Metal) in any CAD software can cause enormous lag in the app.

This article is part of a 3-part series:

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Troubleshooting Large FreeCAD File Sizes

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This article will show you how to find out exactly which layer is causing your FreeCAD file to balloon in size, by getting a granular list of all of the layers in your document tree, sorted by size.

Troubleshooting Large File Sizes in FreeCAD

This article is part of a 3-part series:

Context

Recently, we had a volunteer who made some very helpful contributions to the Eco-Libre Life-Line project — an open-source design for raw water intake, filtration, and storage system for sustainable communities.

The original file was 812 KB. After the changes, the file was 17 MB (compressed). And — worse — manipulating the objects in FreeCAD was now very slow and choppy (spoiler: the uncompressed size was 114 MB).

Before merging the updated objects into our GitHub, I figured that some optimizations could be made to reduce the file size — to make opening the file in FreeCAD much smoother. But which object should I focus on optimizing?

Sorting layers by size

You can see the size of each layer by pasting a small python snippet into FreeCAD’s python console.

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