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I'd love to see blender expand into precise modeling area more (CAD).

ur-whale 6y ago
Strongly agree, and I'd also wish they took a shot at the Architecture market (god knows Autodesk and Archicad sorely deserves the competition) but it's not easy to build a product that fits all possible uses cases, especially when the initial focus of the app was SFX and animation. Specifically, for CAD, blender lacks IMO two fundamental things: - a strong NURBS engine, complete with filleting, trimmed NURBS, CSG, full brep, etc.. (something at least on par with OpenCascade). - a node-based (à la Houdini) modeling system to do full blown paramaterics. The current destructive + Undo/Redo model is simply not strong enough for serious CAD used. For the latter, there are add-ons (e.g. sorcar, sverchok) that try to patch the gap, but they all feel like band-aids when you try to really put them to work.
- phkahler 6y ago
  After spending a lot of time working on the code for SolveSpace, I can say NURBS are hard. Conceptually not bad, but in practice there are a lot of complex or tricky things to do well. My hope is to one day write a new NURBS kernel in Rust. But first I need to find good solutions to those tricky problems.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  I’ve recently been picking up Fusion 360 for use with a 3D printer and I’d love to be able to model this precisely with blender. I don’t love having my projects live in someone’s cloud service (for non commercial use) where they could vanish at a moment’s notice. Tried FreeCAD which is in the same vein of parametric mechanical modeling, but had a lot of trouble getting anywhere productive.
mkaic 6y ago
Agreed. What I wouldn’t give for an Inventor-esque sketch-based parametric workflow.
hughes 6y ago
Definitely. It's pretty much impossible to do parametric modelling at the moment, unless you're willing to resort to generating entire geometry from python.
racnid 6y ago
I know this is a thread about Blender but FreeCAD has been making good progress in that area. Parametric sketching is still different from some of the commercial packages but reasonably functional.

Strongly agree, and I'd also wish they took a shot at the Architecture market (god knows Autodesk and Archicad sorely deserves the competition) but it's not easy to build a product that fits all possible uses cases, especially when the initial focus of the app was SFX and animation. Specifically, for CAD, blender lacks IMO two fundamental things: - a strong NURBS engine, complete with filleting, trimmed NURBS, CSG, full brep, etc.. (something at least on par with OpenCascade). - a node-based (à la Houdini) modeling system to do full blown paramaterics. The current destructive + Undo/Redo model is simply not strong enough for serious CAD used. For the latter, there are add-ons (e.g. sorcar, sverchok) that try to patch the gap, but they all feel like band-aids when you try to really put them to work.

phkahler 6y ago
After spending a lot of time working on the code for SolveSpace, I can say NURBS are hard. Conceptually not bad, but in practice there are a lot of complex or tricky things to do well. My hope is to one day write a new NURBS kernel in Rust. But first I need to find good solutions to those tricky problems.
wlesieutre 6y ago
I’ve recently been picking up Fusion 360 for use with a 3D printer and I’d love to be able to model this precisely with blender. I don’t love having my projects live in someone’s cloud service (for non commercial use) where they could vanish at a moment’s notice. Tried FreeCAD which is in the same vein of parametric mechanical modeling, but had a lot of trouble getting anywhere productive.

mkaic 6y ago

Agreed. What I wouldn’t give for an Inventor-esque sketch-based parametric workflow.

hughes 6y ago

Definitely. It's pretty much impossible to do parametric modelling at the moment, unless you're willing to resort to generating entire geometry from python.

racnid 6y ago

I know this is a thread about Blender but FreeCAD has been making good progress in that area. Parametric sketching is still different from some of the commercial packages but reasonably functional.