CAD In Blender Is HERE! | CAD Sketcher Intro | Constraint Driven Design

The beginning of the CAD modeling in blender has just arrived with CAD Sketcher. A still VERY early in development project to bring CAD Parametric and Constraint Driven Design to blender 3.0 Includes everything from tangents, distances, angles, equal and more.

In a nutshell: 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, dimension, 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.

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Time Stamps:(Coming Soon)

0:00 - CAD Modeling In Blender
00:23 - CAD Sketcher
01:05 - How to get & Install CAD Sketcher
02:38 - Getting Started WIth CAD Modeling In Blender

[designfreedom]

This is potentially one of the very best Blender news ever! As a designer, a real CAD system in Blender would be a dream come true. Thank you very much!

[yourpersonaldatadealer]

Blender is actually one of the most collaborative, artistic, community driven, ethical and interesting piece of software I’ve come across. It’s almost spiritually fulfilling

[PaperKhaos]

We really need an alternative to Fusion 360 for the average hobbyist. Still early days, but I hope CAD Sketcher can eventually fill that gap. Using the blender interface is a genius move and I hope development on this project continues!

[MihaiDesigns]

Wow, very promising CAD features for Blender!

[DSSlocksmiths]

The 2D constraint system already looks better than F360 have managed after half a decade! Brilliant work.

[guynao]

this is incredible honestly. I baught and installed after 10 seconds in. As a long time CAD user getting used to blender-style modelling has always been a challenge. Sketching is one of those things that really makes a difference, especially when it's parametric. Looking forward to see how this will develop in the future.

[jainfanteuottawa]

For me this is a game changer. The biggest obstacle for my diving into Blender was the very "loose" approach to modelling.

[tronique]

As a solidworks professional, I find this add on for blender incredibly powerful and exciting! Having a constrained cad tool that creates meshes directly is very cool. While both Solidworks and Fusion 360 are capable of surface based cad, and Fusion can even work with meshes directly, that is not the main purpose of those tools so the workflow can be really awkward. Blender though is purpose built for meshes. Sketches and constraints really takes Blender to the next level.

[ilovejobbo]

THIS IS INSANE! I've been waiting for this for about 4 long years. I've bought lots of blender add-ons and hard surface tutorials, but it's hard to get my head around. I have 20 years of CAD modeling experience and the parametric way is the fastest and most editable with included precision.

If this is done right, the implications will be huge.

I'm joining everything and will get involved in development even with my limited skills!

[otium]

Being a Blender user and a FreeCad user, I would love to see this addon up and running.
Thank you for your time and effort!!

[RuneRelic]

Excellent.
Long overdue.
Never understood why the open source community required two seperate 3D modelling tools.
Especially when splitting time and development resources instead of combining it.
That is of course, on the proviso CAD sketcher will remain open source & free.
Lots of packages start out that way to get market share, then suddenly go private, once its effectively cornered the market with a must have tool.

[benveasey]

Amazing work guys, congratulations! Another development that helps CAD people to adopt Blender for modelling is that Revit '23 can now insert and cleanup (automatically remove tesselation lines, maybe something to do with coplaner faces?) obj files (both in projects and Families). A lot of CAD people can't make the transition into Blender because it can't natively make technical drawings. This is a massive shame for such a fantastic modelling program.

[fahadbutt]

As a CAD engineer, it is so awesome to see blender getting cad sketcher considering I have been considering to learn blender to consider it's animating and rendering quality for my cad renderings etc. (Lot of consider lol)

[Andysfishing]

Blender Guru shared this in an email, I look forward to using this in the future, so happy we have this now.

[IrocZIV]

This has lots of promise. The more I can stay in Blender for my modeling, the better.

[skellious]

AMAZING. this is what I've been wanting. I only understand parametric CAD modelling not blender style modelling/sculpting so this will help so much.

[Keep-Making]

To everyone: Have fun! and have a little patience with CAD Sketcker its 100% going to have some growing pains but the more people share the news, report bugs and devs join the better it's going to get 🤗

[alihms]

The tool that I've been waiting for. Hoping this will grow into something truly useful for at least a light CAD design work.

[jacoriyerington]

It definitely has a bunch of problems so far but there is certainly a ton of potential for this.

Some things I noticed right away were that :
- The constraints make it really hard to select the center of the circle, as far as I'm aware you can't offset it to the side and there is no box select to make it easier.
Combined with left click deleting constraints and it becomes a problem.
- nothing prevents you from modifying the object in edit mode, however editing the sketch reverts it back.
- modifying the sketch gets rid of effects such as smooth shading and presumably other similar effects.
- keys such as x don't actually let you delete parts of the sketch, it will pop up but not actually work.
- some things will stay around even after you delete the sketch, it will disappear if you open and close the sketch again.
- there is no way to delete a sketch from the sketcher screen without entering the specific sketch
- there seems to be no way to delete part of line when it is tangent to another but goes farther than the tangent.
- there is seemingly no way to snap sketch points to one another, this might just be me missing something

So far, these are all things that I am sure will be fixed in the future but I can't help but imagine the constraints would function better as a set of edit-mode and object-mode tools rather than "sketch tools" . This is primarily because not being able to edit things in edit-mode makes it restraining as everything has to be done with Booleans that linger in the background. I just don't understand why something like this wouldn't be integrated into the object constraints or even added as a new category of "edit-constraints"

Either way, its definitely something I'll look back into in the future when it updates. There's just way too much potential to blow off - especially for something so early in development.

[jimbojimberson]

YES! Finally a complete open source CAD solution. Blender has been poised for this for so long and I've been praying that someone would adapt it for this. If FEA applications are also made available based on this, that would be a dream come true.