I have been using Blender to design 3D models, since I had some knowledge of it. Wondering why not more people are using it for CAD. Are the other tools much better? Why?
You can get CAD Sketcher for Blender which might help.
But Blender is a mesh manipulation environment. Ideal for designing 3D models to go in virtual environments. Not awful for 3D models that are only going to a 3D printer, but fundamentally not the right tool for CAD for general manufacturing, because it cannot natively produce STEP-type geometry.
It's perfect for artistic stuff, but for technical you would rather use something that is oriented towards CSG (so that non-manifold topology is no longer an issue). Then you want edit tree, so that you don't have to redo all of the work to change one little thing in the beginning, and then parametric modelling and a constrain solver.
Blender is a bunch of things - but it is not, 1)a parametric program. 2)deals with complex geometry as mesh, VS nurbs 3) isnt really built to dimension 4)isnt really built for generating documentation which 99% of teh time is primary output of these programs - 2d sheets.
You can use it for 3d printing - but for engineering...nope. The Autodesk family of products / Solidworks are defacto for a reason - they have decades of tooling, libraries and so on that make lightwork of complex tasks. I'd tear my hair out trying to do my work in Blender which i easily do in Inventor, Autocad or Revit.
There are constraint based CAD addons for blender, and the black art of Geometry node rendering pipelines to auto-generate objects/features. There is also the fact most of the system is open Python API based, and thus everything can be generated from code.
However, Blender was not meant to be a constraint based CAD/CAM package.
Solidworks still seems like the leader in offline mode, but parametric-everything FreeCad is evolving at an astonishing rate.
For critical professional work, gambling on opensource is still inappropriate most of the time. =3
I'm keen on trying freecad 1.0. After professional training in engineering drafting, I'm interested to see if I can get by with a lot more understanding of the processes.
