# Thanks Rafael

Commenting post [111](/?blog/2014-111): Thanks Rafael

Oh yes! There is a LOT of stuff to connect to. I regularly keep an eye
on openstudio, but until now it seems a bit fuzzy to me... Lots of data
and diagrams, but the sketchup implementation seems still very basic
(you cannot use much of your existing models, you must draw new
"cubes" only for openstudio). But definitely one day we must attack
that. There was a similar project for blender called "BlendME" that
was a package of several open-source analysis tools (radiance, openfoam,
etc) shaped into a blender plugin. But the project appears to be dead
now... Anyway, there are a lot of opensource analysis tools useful for
architecture.

My own priority, at the moment, is of course IFC compatibility. With
that, we can already rely on external tools to do the rest of the job.
But besides that, there is one other area that we already began to
attack directly in FreeCAD, which is structural engineering. In
structural objects in FreeCAD, we already have implemented the concept
of structural nodes. The idea is to be able to export a structural
analysis-ready model made of bars and nodes. Software such as pybar (
<http://pybar.fr/index.php?page=logiciel-pybar> ) will easily be able to
take that data and perform structural analysis. Who knows, at some point
we might be able to integrate some of it into FreeCAD too.

Anyway, lots of stuff for the future!