Part Workbench¶

The Part workbench provides direct access to OCCT (Open CASCADE Technology) shapes and Boolean operations. Unlike Part Design — which chains features inside a Body — Part operates on arbitrary shapes with no Body container required.

What the Part workbench is for¶

Part gives you three things:

Parametric primitives — boxes, cylinders, spheres, cones, tori, and more. Each is a live object whose dimensions can be changed at any time.
Shape operations — extrude, revolve, loft, sweep, fillet, chamfer, offset, and many more operations that work on any imported or constructed shape.
Boolean algebra — cut one shape from another (Part Cut), fuse two shapes into one (Part Fuse), find their intersection (Part Common), or use the advanced Boolean Fragments / Join / Split tools for complex overlap geometry.

Part is the lower-level workbench. Part Design wraps Part operations in a more opinionated feature-tree workflow. You would reach for Part directly when:

You are working with imported STEP/IGES geometry that does not live inside a Body.
You need operations that Part Design does not expose (Boolean Fragments, Loft across arbitrary profiles, Ruled Surface).
You are scripting shape generation via Python.

Key concepts¶

Shapes vs Features¶

Every Part object is a OCCT TopoDS_Shape — a B-rep (boundary representation) solid, shell, face, wire, edge, or vertex. Operations on shapes produce new shapes; the original shapes remain and can be referenced again.

Parametric primitives¶

Primitives (Box, Cylinder, …) created in the Part workbench are fully parametric: open the Data panel and change any dimension, and the shape updates. They can also be attached to faces, datums, or axes using the Attachment framework.

Topological naming¶

Because Part operates on arbitrary shapes without a strict feature order, it is susceptible to the topological naming problem: when you add or remove a feature, face/edge/vertex names can change, breaking references in downstream features. FreeCAD 1.0+ includes topological naming mitigations that reduce (but do not eliminate) this issue.

Tools overview¶

Group	Tools
Primitives	Cube, Cylinder, Sphere, Cone, Torus, Tube, Primitives dialog, Shape Builder
Mesh & Solid	Shape from Mesh, Points from Mesh, Convert to Solid, Reverse Shapes
Copy	Simple Copy, Transformed Copy, Element Copy, Refine Shape
Boolean	Cut, Fuse, Common, Boolean dialog
Join	Connect Shapes, Embed Shapes, Cutout Shape
Split	Boolean Fragments, Slice Apart, Slice to Compound, Boolean XOR
Compound	Make Compound, Explode Compound, Compound Filter
Modeling	Extrude, Revolve, Mirror, Scale, Fillet, Chamfer, Face from Wires, Ruled Surface, Loft, Sweep, Section, Offset 3D/2D, Thickness, Projection on Surface
Analysis	Check Geometry, Defeaturing, Section Cut, Appearance per Face

Relationship to other workbenches¶

Workbench	Relationship
Sketcher	Provides 2-D profiles for Extrude, Revolve, Sweep, Loft, and Face from Wires.
Part Design	A higher-level workflow built on top of Part operations. Prefer Part Design for solid modelling within a Body; use Part for operations outside a Body or not available in Part Design.

See the Tools index for a complete reference.