Blender on Architectural Record

Published by Federico on February 14th, 2006 in 3D News, Press

Archtectural Record Blender Entry Blender is having a great time during this period, Project Orange is boosting development and some mid-high level artists are getting interested in using this amazing piece of software; so it seems that after years Blender is getting the right amount of popularity/visibility it'll need to make a big step towards the professional audience.

Time has come to start showing off how good is Blender at completing different tasks; if my memory supports me, Blender was just quoted on a few (at least one, I'm sure) magazines, recently I was assigned the task of writing a complete overview/tutorial for a famous e-zine (dunno if I can tell You anything about it right now, so keep the secret :-P), but reading the short entry on Architectural Record was quite a surprise.

Here you'll find Blender listed at the second place right after Revit 8 by Autodesk (shame on me for writing down the name of the evil one :-D) in the "Tech Products" section. Maybe Architectural Record's webmaster played around with the PROCAD 1.0 script by Japy which turns Blender in a usable 2D/3D CAD system (although I prefer the QCAD > dxf2svg > Inkscape > Blender workflow), I see no other reason to rank blender so high on an architecture-centric site leaving out 3D Studio Max/Viz and SketchUp (mea culpa, mea maxima culpa :-P) from the list than its price, or… well… maybe that guy is the greatest fan of Blender :-)

Federico "Lox" Lucignano

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16 Responses to “Blender on Architectural Record”

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1 Simon [daily blendernation comment poster] Feb 15th, 2006 at 12:00 am

Well, another example for the great visualization skills of Blender. At any time the last Max oder C4D User will say that Blender is the better solution ;)

And there is so much potential! I use Blender for Product design (the most use C4D) - and it works excellent!

Simon
2 Karpov Feb 15th, 2006 at 1:15 pm

Thanks for the tip…
But do you know where to find a compiled version of dxf2svg (Linux or Windows) ?

Karpov
3 BArrYZ Feb 15th, 2006 at 1:18 pm

Great news ;-)

I think that the most important things for using blender in CAD world, is an implementation of a strong snap system and an internal renderer supporting GI.

Blender maybe will rule also on cad systems :-D
4 lox_federico Feb 15th, 2006 at 7:40 pm

@ Karpov:
If You need it I will put a windows build online as soon as I find a few minutes to pack it up ;-)
5 DavE Feb 15th, 2006 at 9:35 pm

…blender makes tha bits go tristate,

i think aswell that the snappig sytem is kind of unhandy for exact/fast 3D-CAD-work.
In my opinion the unit system is to unprecise. Making exact measurements is kind of hard in blender.

But of course blenders purpose is a different: quick modelling.
I would prefer better importscript imnprovements.
Often when i import files from max or autocad into blender, a lot of triangle-polys appear.
And for that i got to reedit a lot of the model (to prepare it for subsurface divisions)…

but hopefully one day leaving all the other interessting things behind, i got involved in python to…;)
6 Rickyx Feb 16th, 2006 at 9:20 am

I quote DavE on snap and import…
Ciao
7 Konrad Feb 16th, 2006 at 2:44 pm

I took the risky bet on blender for my visualization-business and have never regretted it since.
8 Twan Feb 17th, 2006 at 12:00 am

I hope that someone can translate the python script (which is refered to in the article) into english so i can understand, or at least try to understand how it works. I'm looking for an aplication to do some architectual art work. Maybe Procad can make my decision.

Twan
9 karpov Feb 18th, 2006 at 12:24 am

I think all of us using Blender as architect, designer,….we should have a place in Elysiun to push on Blender to have the minimum cad tools (maybe just a simple automatic vertex snap,or…). I'd like to quit also Rhino…

Dai Lox, ci metti in linea il tuo build windows ;-)

Karpov (Parigi )
10 lox_federico Feb 18th, 2006 at 2:30 am

Mhhhh, Interest in Blender CAD is rising…

Ok, I have a win build of dxf2svg (which makes a pretty cleaner job than OpenOffice Draw as a converter from QCad to Inkscape) and actually I'm in contact with PROCAD 1.0 script author to deliver an article and an English translation of this usefull tool.

So, have a little pacience and soon you all Blender-cadders-to-be will find a nice surprise here on BlenderNation ;-)

@Karpov: sorry, didn't had time to pack everything up and post it here, I was working hard in the evening to deliver a win32 implementation of mmap & munmap for the CVS Repository (oohhhhh yes, I'm cool B-D, ok… stop with it :-P) and a new test build on which I'm still working (I'm trying to include some patches not compatible with current CVS).
11 IamInnocent Feb 18th, 2006 at 11:06 pm

Frederico,

thanks for letting me know of Procad. A translation will be nice of course but I ain't going to wait for it : Google is my friend. ;)
I can't wait till I can show off Blender at work.

Jean
12 Brent Peeples Feb 20th, 2006 at 3:51 pm

Wow. I just wanted to say that it feels really nice for a piece of my work to be displayed as a thumbnail for an artical. No matter how small.

Brent
13 tehquickness Aug 31st, 2006 at 2:27 pm

has anyone found this dxf2svg? I have been looking and I cannot find it for the life of me.
14 Philip Apr 26th, 2008 at 7:06 pm

Has anyone ever made any progress with using Blender for Architectual Designs? I've had some problems getting Blender to import DFX files with version 4.5. I would like to use Blender 3D professionally for CAD work.
15 Philip Apr 26th, 2008 at 7:17 pm

I stand corrected… Version 2.45 is the version that I'm using. I talked my boss into letting me use the program on a trail bases just to see how far we can go with the program. If I convert the files as SVG's, are they as accurate as DWG files?