I haven’t used Blender for this purpose (or FreeCAD at all, for that matter…just OpenSCAD for doing models for 3D printing). But it looks like Blender has some sort of add-on support for parametric modeling.
A constraint-based sketcher addon created by hlorus for Blender that allows you to create precise 2d shapes by defining CAD geometric constraints like tangents, distances, angles, equal and more. These Sketches are then converted into beziers or mesh which still stay editable through a fully non-destructive workflow i.e, Geometry nodes and modifiers.
It’s not, historically, the main purpose of the software, but maybe Blender will ultimately wind up moving into the CAD world too to some degree.
RandomLegend@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
This is nothing you have to see personally like this but it’s pretty much the definition. Blender is not CAD. End of story.
thantik@lemmy.world 6 months ago
CAD-Sketcher blender addon. 'nuff said.
RandomLegend@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
imho this isn’t really up to the task of complex CAD. But it’s good enough for very simple things i suppose.
ScottE@lemm.ee 6 months ago
CAD Sketcher improves Blender a bit, but it’s still not good enough to turn Blender into a dimensionally accurate CAD, and I found the UI to be fairly clunky and if anything even less intuitive than FreeCAD, honestly.
wjrii@kbin.social 6 months ago
So is there an open source direct modeler? I've been working in Designspark, but while it is not currently as onerous as F360 or OnShape (god forbid I stumble into something that other people decide might be worth a few bucks), it's still a (free for now) subscription and has had feature erosion, specifically importing darn near anything pre-existing. I'm not making anything complex enough that it suffers from the Direct Modeling workflow, and I find that workflow much more intuitive. Shoot, I'd even settle for a fork of Solvespace with chamfers and fillets, LOL.