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The trouble is that Blender is fundamentally the wrong platform to build a parametric (solid body) modeller on. Everything in blender is a mesh, whereas in a pa

The trouble is that Blender is fundamentally the wrong platform to build a parametric (solid body) modeller on. Everything in blender is a mesh, whereas in a parametric solid body modeller everything is a BREP[0]. It would ether need a new BREP kernel or to include an existing open source BREP kernel, the most advanced being OpenCASCADE which FreeCAD is built upon. Would love to be proved wrong though! 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation 1: https://www.opencascade.com https://www.opencascade.com

wlesieutre 6y ago
Blender is mostly meshes, but it can already have other geometry types like NURBS. You can convert a nurbs object to a mesh, but the modeling process and data format is totally different. I'm imagining that the solid modeling system would be a separate mode type like that.
- eloisant 6y ago
  Still, blender is not a CAD tool. It's great to great organic designs (characters, animals, figurines, etc.) but it's not good for functional parts. And it will never be, CAD and 3D modeling for organic/art are fundamentally different.
  - KMnO4 6y ago
    I wonder how much work it would be to turn it into a proper CAD tool. I would donate a significant chunk of my paycheck to Blender if it supported parametric CAD. Obviously that would be pocket change to the Blender Foundation, but if enough people did then maybe it would be worth it. I'd wager there a fairly big group of people like me who need somewhat decent CAD for hobby use. And if those who can afford to pay put that money towards Blender, we could make it better overall for those who can't.
    - UncleEntity 6y ago
      > I wonder how much work it would be to turn it into a proper CAD tool. Never used it myself but there are some CAD tool addons you can try -- also they seem to have incorporated some 'hard modeling' features which, I would imagine, aren't that far from the CADiverse. Also, unless they worked on it (semi)recently, the NURBS in blender is a bit of a trainwreck which everyone was scared to even look in its direction.
sudosysgen 6y ago
Actually, blender supports many more basic objects than meshes, it's just that the basic shape must be convertible to a mesh eventually. Which is also the case in any other software, because GPUs only support mesh rasterization. So, you could implement a BREP object along with primitives to convert it to a mesh and it would work just fine. There are already objects such as particles, metaballs, hairs, NURBS, splines, and so on.
fsloth 6y ago
Brep is just a polygon mesh. Speaking as a person who has to juggle them occasionally at work. So the current Blender modeling options are isomorphic to those of a BREP modeller. All it would need are some more constraints. What is lacking, is the parametric history.

wlesieutre 6y ago

Blender is mostly meshes, but it can already have other geometry types like NURBS. You can convert a nurbs object to a mesh, but the modeling process and data format is totally different. I'm imagining that the solid modeling system would be a separate mode type like that.

eloisant 6y ago
Still, blender is not a CAD tool. It's great to great organic designs (characters, animals, figurines, etc.) but it's not good for functional parts. And it will never be, CAD and 3D modeling for organic/art are fundamentally different.
- KMnO4 6y ago
  I wonder how much work it would be to turn it into a proper CAD tool. I would donate a significant chunk of my paycheck to Blender if it supported parametric CAD. Obviously that would be pocket change to the Blender Foundation, but if enough people did then maybe it would be worth it. I'd wager there a fairly big group of people like me who need somewhat decent CAD for hobby use. And if those who can afford to pay put that money towards Blender, we could make it better overall for those who can't.
  - UncleEntity 6y ago
    > I wonder how much work it would be to turn it into a proper CAD tool. Never used it myself but there are some CAD tool addons you can try -- also they seem to have incorporated some 'hard modeling' features which, I would imagine, aren't that far from the CADiverse. Also, unless they worked on it (semi)recently, the NURBS in blender is a bit of a trainwreck which everyone was scared to even look in its direction.

sudosysgen 6y ago

Actually, blender supports many more basic objects than meshes, it's just that the basic shape must be convertible to a mesh eventually. Which is also the case in any other software, because GPUs only support mesh rasterization. So, you could implement a BREP object along with primitives to convert it to a mesh and it would work just fine. There are already objects such as particles, metaballs, hairs, NURBS, splines, and so on.

fsloth 6y ago

Brep is just a polygon mesh. Speaking as a person who has to juggle them occasionally at work. So the current Blender modeling options are isomorphic to those of a BREP modeller. All it would need are some more constraints. What is lacking, is the parametric history.