It’s very early days for CAD Sketcher, a new parametric CAD add-on for Blender by [hlorus], but it looks very promising.
We do a lot of 3D work and like Blender as an environment. It’s always annoying that Blender doesn’t do parametric modeling, so we’re forced into a dedicated CAD package. Blending the two for that robot ocelot is always particularly annoying.
CAD Sketcher lets the user make a ‘sketch’, a 2D drawing. They then constrain it, saying “this line is vertical, that line is parallel to this one”, until the sketch is fully defined. It’s a normal part of parametric modelling. This is powerful when your model needs refined over and over.
There’s an old adage, “Better a tool that does 90% of the job well than one that does 100% poorly”. For CAD systems, (and much other software), we’d suggest “Better a tool that does 90% of the job well and works with whatever does the other 10%”.
Guard Drawn In CAD Sketcher And Blender
We tried a test part, and being in Blender’s universe showed its value. CAD Sketcher doesn’t do bevels and rounds yet, and probably won’t for a while. But Blender’s perfectly happy doing them.
It’s not going to put SolidWorks out of business any time soon, but it’s a very promising new development. We hope it gathers some community and encourage contributions.
We cover CAD frequently, like the recent advances with CadQuery and the port of OpenSCAD to WASM.
[thanks paulvdh]
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