Blender-FreeCAD Live Link

Live link to send a model from FreeCAD to Blender in a single-click.

Final source code of my article Build your own Live Links for Blender (and more).

How it works

The Blender addon creates a listening socket as soon as Blender starts up. Upon clicking on Export to Blender in FreeCAD, a temporary diretory is creater in the system temp folder and an OBJ is exported to this temporary directory. Then FreeCAD will send the full path to the OBJ in this directory to Blender through the socket connection. Blender would then import the model and send back a success message upon which FreeCAD will close the connection and cleanup the temporary directory.

Installation

1. Place the folder BlenderLiveLink inside the Mod directory of FreeCAD installation folder. Refer to this page in the FreeCAD wiki for platform-specific instructions.
2. Place the folder FreeCADLiveLink inside the Blender addons directory. Refer to this page in the Blender documentation for platform-specific instructions. Then enable the addon from the your Preferences.

Usage

Once you have installed the scripts, open a model in FreeCAD and also keep Blender running. Click on the Blender menu in FreeCAD menu bar and click Export to Blender. The model will be exported and imported into the running instance of Blender automatically.