I put them up here, in the event that they might prove useful to someone else. These addons are small enough for me to maintain and tweak to do exactly what I need them to do in order to speed up my workflow –Like I said, spare time is scarce.īeing open-sourced under the GPL license, the addons come with the full set of disclaimers (applicability, suitability and lack of support). What you will find here, is a collection of Blender addons that I've created as my personal productivity tools, or to simply making CAD designs in Blender even more enjoyable. As a bonus, you also don't get to be vendor locked-in (Fusion 360 anyone?), but this may be a topic for a different discussion -) In total, I think the trade-offs are favorable. I have only little spare time and I don't need to send blueprints of my designs to a production facility. Especially if you are, like me, a hobbyist. And, in particular, for designs that are meant to be 3D printed, I think the non-destructive and non-linear workflow that Blender offers, exceeds that of any commercial Solid Modelling tool. Blender CAD Toolsīlender CAD Tools is a collection of Blender addons to make CAD design with Blender even more enjoyable. I find it very good.CAD Design in Blender?. The idea to expand Blender for machanical Industrie. Perhaps one could integrate an extended nurbs modeling. Sure, if you work just for optics, it is not so important when a millimeter is missing, but for mechanics on machines it´s a problem. Nurbs already exist there, but relatively simple. Such a possibility I would wish in Blender. It offers the possibility to work with data such as Iges, Step, SAT, Rhino in the main program. This interview with Mathilde Amp shows the problems very well:Īn example of a successful integration is the AddOn PowerNurbs / Power Translator for 3DS MAX. The industrial standard is IGES and STEP. A bidirectional import / export option would be an enormous extension here. The industry would like to work more with Blender, but without the nurbs that provide process security, It´s still a problem. The export from Soliworks as STL works relatively well, but has the disadvantage that it is difficult to change later changes. That is why he certainly does not come into question. Almost all CAD / CAM programs use the Parasolid kernel, which however has to be licensed.

Sure, I understand your worries, but the industry uses nurbs to modeling.

Blender cad