Blender and CAD

[Alvaro]

Hello every one, I been looking around how different blender CAD solutions has been going but I find it difficult due to there are so many of them that has been started up, does any one know about some blender cad that is still beeing worked on or have been taken far in development? Maybe some one know of some other opensorce 3d CAD tools avalible?

What I have found that seams most promessing at the time beeing is Freecad and qcad

[Jimustanguitar]

What do you mean by "Blender" CAD? I'm not familiar with the reference. Is this from the graphic design side of CAD instead of the mechanical design side?

[geneb]

Blender != CAD.

g.

[jmick]

Blender is an awesome 3D modeling program and you can export STL files from it


Blender Basics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91kcyOeiNcg

Watch the first 3 tutor videos of this software at the you tube address above and you will soon realize that you will never need to look any further
for drawing software for your 3d printer. The capabilities of this software are without limit.

[geneb]

Horsepucky.

Blender is a very nice 3D _modeler_. It's NOT a CAD tool! If you want to build cute organic shapes, or spaceships or whatever, Blender works just great. If you want to build mechanical parts that have to fit to pre-existing objects or to build something like a new 3D printer, it is NOT the tool you want to choose.

A good open source, parametric design tool is FreeCAD. Avoid OpenSCAD. It's a poor programming language badly masquerading as a parametric design tool.
Commercially, you can go with AutoDesk Inventor (my choice) or SolidWorks.

I'd no more use Blender for CAD than I'd use a crayon to mark something I'd just measured with a micrometer.

g.

[JohnStack]

I've been through the whole cad thing - trying to find a package I could understand and yet produce some reasonable 3D designs.

I love 123Design but it is not CAD and the STLs created by it seem to be out of scale every single time.

I've been using QCad CAM and that seems to work pretty well. It opens the SeeMeCNC DXFs just fine; however, I have yet to figure out how to reliably do 3D with it.

I didn't get Blender at all. Don't know why.

Sketchup was also decent but they want you to make a decision in a month - so it didn't fit my timeline.

Freecad - well, I thought it was too script intense....I want to avoid scripts. I've coded lots in my life but for this, I would love to avoid code.

My ideal:

Something like 123Design / Inventor that costs about $300 or less.

Perhaps I should give up and figure out scripting 3D objects.

I love 3D printing but geesh - you sure get tugged and pulled in very wide and diverse directions. Maybe when Leap Motion integrates with a CAD application, we'll get across the chasm.

[geneb]

I've used FreeCAD before and nowhere did I see a requirement to use scripts. Are you confusing it with OpenSCAD?

g.

[RegB]

These might help;

http://rab3d.com/tut_blender.php