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Blender 5.0

blender.org

61–70 of 377 posts

Re: Blender 5.0

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeCAD is the front-runner for me. KiCAD was also a meh ECAD FOSS alternative 7-8 years ago, now it is by far the tool of choice for regular ECAD designs. I can see FreeCad getting there by 2030.

FreeCAD is probably the single most frustrating and unintuitive pieces of software I have ever used. I almost drafted hate mail to the devs after 15 minutes of crash coursing fusion360 got me further than 2 days of trying to use FreeCAD. It seems like it has lots of capability but still "punch your monitor" levels of difficulty just trying to do the most basic stuff.

I use FreeCAD and it's pretty good. But I think it's impossible to learn by trial and error.

MangoJelly has done an amazing job in churning out high quality tutorials for FreeCAD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yh_S31R9g&list=PLWuyJLVUNt...

(this is just one playlist, there's a lot more on his channel).

Re: Blender 5.0

#62
post #26

I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…

Onshape has blown me away with its browser interface and how quick it all loads. And as long as your projects are public, it's free.

I really didn't like how they both require a phone number and make all of your files public. I've stuck with Fusion which seems a lot more privacy respecting while also being basically free for home users.

Re: Blender 5.0

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender is a decent option for low effort 3d modeling for 3d printing in my experience

During COVID I learnt Blender for 3D modelling. It is still my go to. Many people complain about it being a mesh editor but it works for me. The sheer variety of tooling and flexibility in Blender is insane, and that's before you get to the world of add-ons. I want to learn Geometry nodes and object generation as I think they will address a lot of the "parametric" crowd concerns. This v5 is meant to be a big step in…

In MCAD, “parametric” does not mean a high level part or feature is driven by editable parameters or procedurally generated features. Parametric refers to the underlying storage format representing part features in a parametric way rather than as a mesh. Mesh formats like stl cannot represent a circle by its position and radius, while a parametric format like step can. This distinction is more akin to raster (bmp) vs vector (svg) graphics. Both can be generated procedurally by “parameters”, but only with svg can sub-features be faithfully extracted or transformed.

Re: Blender 5.0

#64
post #26

I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…

Onshape has blown me away with its browser interface and how quick it all loads. And as long as your projects are public, it's free.

Wish they had something between $0 and $1500/yr.

Re: Blender 5.0

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeCAD is the front-runner for me. KiCAD was also a meh ECAD FOSS alternative 7-8 years ago, now it is by far the tool of choice for regular ECAD designs. I can see FreeCad getting there by 2030.

FreeCAD is probably the single most frustrating and unintuitive pieces of software I have ever used. I almost drafted hate mail to the devs after 15 minutes of crash coursing fusion360 got me further than 2 days of trying to use FreeCAD. It seems like it has lots of capability but still "punch your monitor" levels of difficulty just trying to do the most basic stuff.

how long ago did you try? the recent advances have turned me into a believer as a hobbyist compared to the first time i checked it out.

Re: Blender 5.0

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why ACES and not something like P3?

Display P3 (distinct from cinema display P3, because names are hard ig) is used as a render target color space. ACES (and its internal color spaces) are designed as working spaces. If you make a color space for a display, the intent is that you can (eventually) get a display which can display all those colors. However, given the shape of the human color gamut, you can't choose three color primaries which form a trian…

no monitor uses ACES so it always needs to be converted to P3 to even see what you're doing right?

or you are saying if there is some intermediate transform that makes color go beyond P3 it will get clipped? then I understand...

Re: Blender 5.0

#67
post #26

I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…

The problem with FreeCAD and every other free/open source MCAD project of note is the Open Cascade kernel they are built on. While Open Cascade is fairly mature, it has dealbreaker issues in a few key areas: fillets cannot consume connected faces and may fail for a number of other reasons, cylindrical and spherical faces require seams which often cause issues with boolean operations, and shapes like helixes are also…

Sandia seems to have some form of kernel, but only Federal-associated entities can get access to it.

It would be interesting to see if they would license that out further for some amount of money.

Re: Blender 5.0

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blender is a decent option for low effort 3d modeling for 3d printing in my experience

During COVID I learnt Blender for 3D modelling. It is still my go to. Many people complain about it being a mesh editor but it works for me. The sheer variety of tooling and flexibility in Blender is insane, and that's before you get to the world of add-ons. I want to learn Geometry nodes and object generation as I think they will address a lot of the "parametric" crowd concerns. This v5 is meant to be a big step in…

Alibre has a free option, which does not include sheetmetal bending but otherwise solid software

Re: Blender 5.0

#69
post #26

I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…

IDK how they compare to professional CAD tools, but I've heard good things about FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. I know that some people use Blender for CAD work, and there are even some extensions to make it easier, but I'm dubious that the representation of meshes that Blender uses are well-suited for CAD applications.

I just tried FreeCAD last week. I uninstalled it after about 10 minutes. The most basic actions to just get started were throwing errors. Maybe it was user error, but it was a very bad first impression.

Re: Blender 5.0

#70
post #26

I’d really like to see something like blender come for the 3D CAD industry, at the moment it feels like the only people who would lose out are AutoDesk. The amount of money that flows in and out of 3D cad (as subscription and then value created) having a first class open source kernel and tooling, would be giving big industrial players freedom to modify and tailor to their needs as well as smaller / hobbyists get sta…

Blender is a decent option for low effort 3d modeling for 3d printing in my experience

Depends if your goal is artistic or functional. Blender is good if you are trying to make character models, etc. It's not great when you are trying to make a part that has to fit something in the real world and after printing you discover one step half way through needs to be 1mm shorter.
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