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Tech Preview: Mechanical Sketch Drawing

37

Mauge writes:

As Blender itself is not good for Mechanical CAD, we are developing some CAD features over a 2.48a Blender Realease.

Here's our first test.

There is lot of work missing, you can see what it is done in info.txt project file. [Edit Bart: no idea where that file would be. Anyone?]

Website: https://projects.blender.org/projects/mechanicblender

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

37 Comments

  1. This looks very promising!

    I had first came to Blender because I was looking for an open source CAD application, looked at what was available and fell in love with the way blender works and it's ridiculously/fantastically versatile nature. I was so dang fed up with most commercial CAD suites I had to learn (especially) ProE, which we used in the Engineering program but not the Engineering-CAD program (in which I used Auto-CAD) at my college that I couldn't bring myself to get even the student version of any of those programs. I used to be the Engineering and Fabrication Lab manager there at the college and let me tell you; Blender was the fastest and easiest program to use to get a 3D idea/design into reality, I tried them all!
    With functionality such as I see here added to the mix; let's just say it would turn some heads!

  2. Looks really cool, good work!

    Might have a hard time getting this into official blender, though. It does not look too "blendery".

  3. Nice work. please please please squeeze this into the 2.5 build folks!

    Or at least Kai's uber builds of 2.49!
    Looks really useful.

  4. great!
    and not anly for architects...

    i wonder why all the cad projects will not be put together in the next blender 2.5 or in the 3.0...
    for example procad plugin... i know i always speak of it... may be because the developer is a good person...

  5. Very interesting stuff, I liked the simple concept, the implementation of a constraint solver that outputs valid blender meshes... Very "blender-way". And maybe, if it behaves like a library is the best path to have it included into blender some day.

  6. I really like this. I already have used Blender to figure some angles that have been missing in a bird house plan that I am building. This would make the use of Blender so much easier for making plans.

  7. this is awesome:) always thought that some CAD features woud come in handy for some of the tasks one comes across...
    Thanks for working this out!!!

  8. Great work!! The feature I always look for. I hope this is only a first step to get an open CAD and parametric tool in the future. Keep it running, plez!!

  9. THAT is awesome! Great work! :D

    This is an incredible addition, and I hope it gets implemented into 2.5!
    This will save much blood, sweat, and tears, for Blender users designing architecture.

    @Robert
    Thanks for posting that link. That would also be a VERY powerful feature for CAD work in blender. Many a SCI-FI robot will come to life with that tool.

  10. Great!

    This have been blender's weak point. To make this mechanical plug-in more useful it would be necessary to create a blender-plotter so real drawings can be plotted.

  11. Onc this kind of thing is in the general release, Blender usage will explode! I'm sure there are thousands like myself who us blender for architectural visualisaion but waste hundreds of hours getting things right "by eye". Briliant! Well done guys, I'll buy you a pint! :)

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