Using Blender like CAD: Measuring distances

When presenting Blender as an alternative to traditional CAD tools for design and architecture, a common question is how to measure distances. Blender offers two primary built-in methods without requiring add-ons: Mesh Editing Overlays and the Measure Tool. The Mesh Editing Overlays allow you to display the length of any selected edge, while the Measure Tool provides a dynamic way to draw a ruler and measure distances in your projects.

To use these tools effectively, it’s crucial to double-check your units settings and object scale factors, as transformations in Blender can affect displayed lengths. For design work, the Measure Tool used with the CTRL key pressed enables a snap feature similar to the OSNAP tool in CAD software, capturing reference points from the model. While these methods don’t create dimension lines, they offer quick ways to verify distances and lengths in your Blender projects, mimicking common CAD workflows.

In this tutorial, Allan Brito explores the use of those tools from a CAD user point of view: