Awesome
Blender 5.0
71–80 of 377 posts
Re: Blender 5.0
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I tried it this year. Not in too much depth, but I tried Fusion and FreeCAD for the first time this year for 3D printing and found I was getting much further much faster on Fusion.
I'm sure I could grind harder and learn more and make FreeCAD work, but I'm not sure why I'd bother.
Re: Blender 5.0
#73I’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…
Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government. Parasolid is powering practically every major CAD system. Its development started in 1986 and it's still actively developed. The amount of effort that goes into those things is immense (39 years of commercial development!) and I don't believe it can be…
> Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government.
Can you help me understand why this problem is so hard?
Re: Blender 5.0
#74I’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…
Plasticity is the closest thing to this, I think. It uses Parasolid, which Blender does not, and supports xNURBS, which Blender does not.
Plasticity is closed source though?
Re: Blender 5.0
#75I’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…
Something that I've daydreamed of in the past is making a new constructive solid geometry "kernel" around which a CAD application could be wrapped based on projective geometric algebra (PGA).
The algorithms it enables are fundamentally more capable and robust than traditional kernels based on linear algebra (vectors and matrices). You can do really fancy things like interpolating in space and time robustly, find extrema in high-dimensional phase spaces, etc...
This could potentially allow straightforward and robust solvers for kinematics, optimal shape finding, etc...
Every few decades there's a "step change" where some new algorithm or programming paradigm sweeps away the old approach because suddenly a hobbyist can do the same thing solo that took dozens of developers a decade in the past. I suspect (but cannot prove) that PGA is one of those things.
Re: Blender 5.0
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Do you mind sharing what you were trying to do? I love FreeCAD so I'd be happy to help you do it if you'd be willing to give it a second try.
Re: Blender 5.0
#77What’s the consensus on the future of this type of 3D tool? Especially for video animation/CGI in movies/tv/ads? Seems like in 10 years AI will basically make it pointless to use a tool like this at least for people working on average projects. What do folks in the industry think? What’s the long term outlook?
If you don’t work in the industry, you have zero chance of accurately evaluating whether or not, or how, it will be impacted by any new technology. The fact that it “seems easy” is a great flag that it probably isn’t.
This seems like an unnecessarily unkind response. The post you're replying to is sharing their opinion and asking what people who are in the industry think about it.
Re: Blender 5.0
#78Every time Blender has a new update, I scroll and I'm amazed by how much is in it. Then I realize my scrollbar is only halfway through.
Radial tiling my beloved, and a seemingly far more straightforward array modifier For those wondering "where the AI is", the new Convolve Node might be it :) Convolutions are a pretty generic signal processing operation (Hadamard product) which are also used in neural networks which work with images. Realistically though, this will be mostly useful for wonky hand-crafted blurs.
The new sequencer looks fantastic, too. I always went to DaVinci Resolve but I might be able to go full blender. Compositor modifiers in the sequencer is also very welcome.
This is incredible for me.
Re: Blender 5.0
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Approached it with the same attitude at the same time, after 10 minutes decided to view some basic tutorial (for an earlier release) that made things clear and I could continue basic tinkering on my own.
But of course built-in intro of Solidworks was a way better UX.
Re: Blender 5.0
#80I’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…
On a scale from "big chunk of work" to "complete rewrite", how much work would it take to fix those issues in Open Cascade?