Yorik van Havre

I am an architect by trade, and one of the main FreeCAD developers (been around since 2008 or so). In FreeCAD, I'm mostly responsible for implementing BIM-related features, but I also work on many of the other areas and workbenches. BIM stands for Building Information Modeling, and describes a family of tools to model and represent buildings digitally. This goes far further than just plans, a BIM model is a complex and faithful representation of a building, and allows to extract not only plans and sections, but a large quantity of information, such as materials, costs, possible maintenance costs over time, construction planning, etc. With a good BIM model, you can also perform a wide range of simulations, such as calculating efforts in structures, energy consumption, etc. And finally, maybe the most important point, BIM models should be highly shareable and should integrate nicely all the work of the different people working on a building project, mainly through the use of the IFC file format.

Me and others in the FreeCAD community are working to make FreeCAD a first-class BIM modeling application, that is capable to do the same job (or better, why not!) as commercial BIM software. FreeCAD is free and open-source, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, and will stay free forever (it cannot be "closed" or "bought"). There is quite a lot done already, FreeCAD is already a very usable BIM application. But there is much more to be done, both to implement new tools and functionality, and to refine the interface to make all this more intuitive to use and user-friendly.

By sponsoring me here, you are allowing me to spend a bigger part of my working hours on FreeCAD development. At the moment I am spending roughly a quarter of my month on it. I don't want to give up working as an architect, of course, that would even be bad for FreeCAD BIM development, because the constant, real-life experience is important, but being able to work half a month on FreeCAD is my goal. Thanks a million if you are considering or already helping me to reach it!

The story of what I'm doing with FreeCAD is registered here, and also on my blog. I also post about it on twitter and other social networks, and regularly do short videos to explain some of the BIM features. If you want to keep track of latest improvements in FreeCAD (not only mine), check the new features section of the FreeCAD forum.