this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Blender
The people editing their images in Blender are the same people who edit their videos in Blender lol.
Has it gotten better with editing? I tried a couple of years ago and just couldn't. It's amazing for the 3d software. If they could make it easier to measure things, I'd use it for CAD too.
FreeCAD for CAD as others mentioned.
Sadly FreeCAD is absolutely shit compared to what commercial CAD products offer - and sadly even 1.0 didn't change their problems.
Depends on your needs. I probably wouldn't consider it good enough yet for commercial but the improvements on 1.0 take care of pretty much all of my needs. The "free" licenses for Fusion360 and OnShape are garbage and feel like nothing more than attempts to get hobbyists and small businesses locked in before changing terms. Plus, last I checked, they pull the same kinda data vacuum bullshit that social media companies did in their terms - "free" license holders should expect any and all of their work to be resold by the companies for profit.
But we are talking about a commercial level here - Adobe Photoshop is primarily a professional software that is also used by prosumers/hobbyists,not vice versa. We all judge e.g. Affinity on that level (rightfully).
And seen from that level FreeCAD is,well, what I said. Sure,it might do for some hobbyists and even some small companies, but even then it shows it's massive structural flaws. Which partly, and this is why I am so openly critical of it, exist for 5+ years and are there due to the ongoing infighting in the development community.
The problem with is roughness is also a problem in terms of commercial use. When I do things as a hobbyist it's just my time that is consumed. Not ideal,but it is what it is. In a commercial setting my staff takes more time due to this roughness and that costs money - much more money than commercial solutions cost. Which is bad - especially as it forces people to stick with Windows as there are no properly working alternatives on Linux.
And yes, onshape and fusion are horrible to hobbyists in that regard, but Solidedge(free) and to some extend Solidworks(cheap) are decent.
I have to agree with pretty much everything that you've said there. Since I don't use CAD professionally, and I'm not about to suffer through the windows experience voluntarily, I'm pretty much such with FreeCAD and (when I get around to it) CADquery. Hopefully more companies will start supporting Linux and free CAD devs from all the MS fuckery - might even get FreeCAD (or a fork) to be more productive and prioritize things necessary to be competitive for SMB/hobbyists.
Yeah, it's a real pain, sadly. Tbh, I don't think we will ever find a major CAD company support Linux again - even Siemens, who supported NX on Linux for ages have stopped.
From my POV we have two choices: Either we make FreeCAD a viable alternative that beats the competition or at least is on the same page as them - which I find highly unlikely with the current system, so a fork+someone who finances it would be needed- or we find ways to optimise/enable Windows based CAD on Linux*. The former worked for the other tool we regularly use: QGIS. That has become the de facto standard in a lot of fields and has sometimes even pushed out commercial competition.
The later is imho the better way for CAD as it is really really hard for companies to change their CAD (even within windows and with a commercial product) - I have a business estimate for an medical product company who estimated 30k € per employee under ideal conditions, possibly more if something goes wrong(Training, loss of production, licencing, converting of files, integration of external databases,etc.). We have done it for games (tbf,with a lot of help from valve) and surely can do it with CAD (which in theory should be easier).
The last option is a bad one: In theory we could use FreeCAD as a backengine and develop themes that replicate the workflow of other products. But for that FreeCAD would need to improve on so many points beforehand...
Photoshop is a professional level software that is used by hobbyists as well - we compare affinity to this level as well and that's okay.
So we should compare FreeCAD on this level as well. And from that perspective it's sadly exactly what I called it.
The roughness from a commercial perspective is an issue as it costs money - because it takes people much more time to do things,even when they work.
And there are still way too many issues with it that sometimes are a result of infighting within the development community and exist for5+ years. To name a few:
More complex imports are basically a nightmare especially with more complex facets
Large file handling is unstable as f***. Our CAD files are commercial building size or "complex medical product" sized and despite having more than enough resources allocated FreeCAD crashes frequently without even proving any hints to the user why. The issue behind it is known for years, though.
We had multiple issues with using older files that were saved on different OSes - really great if you can't access files that are 16 months old. Also a known issue.
Standardised rollout is still basically impossible.
Just to name a few... It's simply not on the level even Solidworks has in that regards (which has it's own issues,yes, I am on the same page with you there). While I don't really like Siemens NC (or Solidedge for that matter) it's indeed a reasonably good software - but me disliking them might be the result of them dropping Linux support more or less unannounced. AutoCAD and it's sister products are imho worse than Creo,but again: More of a personal thing. In the end they sadly (!) beat FreeCAD in all aspects. By far. Which is pretty much a catastrophe as FreeCAD is the only Linux alternative atm.
Maybe I'm doing too much engineering - I found Open SCAD to be way easier than Blender for making stuff, and that's saying something because Open SCAD is quite a pain.
I can see why for engineering, it allows you to be super precise. I'm not sure the people who developed the CAD side of Blender have ever used it for anything precise or to build details and drawings of any kind. They just seem clueless, there is no other way to put it. AutoSketch used to be so great, maybe the paid version is now. That was different than AutoCAD and Revit, but I loved it.
I’ve always seen Blender as a 3D art tool but never as a precise 3D engineering tool. Didn’t even know Blender had CAD features
Me too. As I said before, it's just on my wish list. I've learned Blender pretty darn well. If it could do CAD in a decent way, it would be perfect. There are too many UI's in my head as it is.
I hate the syntax in OpenSCAD. It LOOKS like something object-oriented but it is procedural, causing oh so many footguns, if one expects it to act like OOP.
I'm a mostly procedural thinker, even though I program in OOP all day long. OpenSCAD works a lot like the rest of my code: write it, try it, look at the results, curse, revise it, try it, look at the results, curse differently... you get there eventually. I do highly suggest not coding a masterpiece in OpenSCAD without visualizing the components first.
It doesn't do it natively, but it does have plugins for CAD features
I believe i recall there being an update specifically to the video editor within the past year or two, but don’t quote me on that. They have done updates to post processing, the timeline functionality, grease pencil, and i believe some other things that would apply to video editing, so i imagine it would be easier to work with. There are cad and measuring add-ons as well, i believe some free within blender itself.
I bought Davinci, so I'm happy with that, but I'll still check out the Blender version. I can't really complain about it, it does so much and is free.
As far as CAD goes, they aren't really usable to be fast in CAD. It's super cumbersome. You should be able to move things 1" to the right or left, put things at certain heights and move around the space in an easy way. I haven't found anything that can do that for imperial. Also, the tools for making dimensions is really bad and I don't think there's a way to make a blueprint unless you come up with something yourself. That being said, it's free and it's not their focus. They concentrate on the 3D portions.
I've started using FreeCAD for CAD work, I've used Fusion 360 for 5 years before trying FreeCAD (again, I tried it a few years ago) and it works pretty good.
It's different and it's taking some getting used to but it's working out quite nicely so far.
I'll give that a try again. I tried that about 3 or 4 years ago and couldn't make that switch, but I can't remember why, lol.
The 1.0 release helps a lot. They got a bit of a kick in the pants while Ondsel existed.
Oh definitely do. The recent improvements (in the last 1-2 years) have made it much more useable, and sometimes even intuitive.
Unless they've changed it in the last 2 releases, it's still that you have to decimal out the inches. So 1" would be .0833333. I don't have time for that shit. It's so easy in any other cad program from decades ago. Like I said, it's obviously not their focus and that's fine. It's just on my wish list.
The imperial units still default to feet, but you can append a " to type in inches! You can also get fractions with one in the numerator by typing /x, and if you go into preferences -> input -> keyboard and check "Default to Advanced Numeric Input" you can type in e.g. 3/8" as well as do things like addition, subtraction, and multiplication in your numeric inputs. ^-^
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I have no idea what you're trying to communicate. You seem to know Blender really well and can modify it easily. That is my worst nightmare. I wish there was a way for them to just have an architectural drawing units button, it would be so freaking easy to use. Making drawings would still be a pain, because you can't print to scale, but building things the right way in 3D would be a start.
Ah, I definitely could've formatted that better, sorry about that. ^-^ For what it's worth, I'm no expert with blender, I was just rambling a bit. I'll try again, but the tldr is that while it's probably not very good for engineering yet, it has been getting better at it bit by bit. Once you change two settings it's easy now to do what you were talking about and move objects by an inch without needing to calculate and type out decimal values.
The first setting is to switch the
Units Systembetween unitless (I think this used to be the only option), metric, and imperial. The dropdown for that is in theScenetab of the right sidebar (the icon is a cone behind a sphere with a dot above it, it's probably right above a red globe icon), under a folder calledUnits.To get to the second setting you need to go to the
Editdropdown at the top of the screen, selectPreferences..., pick theInputsection from the left sidebar of the window that pops up, and under theKeyboardfolder activate the checkbox labelledDefault to Advanced Numeric Input. My earlier message wasn't quite accurate, it turns out this setting is more important than I'd thought.With both of those settings changed, you can select something in your model and press
gto grab it, then x, y, or z to move along a particular axis, if you then type1blender will move the object one foot along that axis. If instead you type1"it will handle the conversion and move one inch.As a bonus, the advanced numeric input also lets you use fractions and do simple math, so if you want to move something by 3/8" along the x axis you can type
gx3/8"<enter>or if you want to move something by 1/16" less than 3/4" without bothering with the math, you can type ingx3/4"-1/16"<enter>, though unfortunately it's important to put the quotation mark after both fractions or the one without will be interpreted as that fraction of a foot.^-^' Hopefully that's a little clearer, like I said at the top it's probably still not the best tool for what it sounds like you want to do with it, but the thing you said was on your wishlist has been added and in my experience it did make blender significantly more useful for designing simple real world objects.
I'll take a look again, thanks.
FreeCAD (for less-organic modeling)