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Comment by blooalien | Hacker News Reader

There's https://www.cadsketcher.com/ addon for Blender. Blender isn't really a CAD program, but apparently it's got enough 3D functionality that it's possible to do CAD in it. Would need to hear from someone more familiar with CAD than I to know whether it's really viable yet or not. Blender's excellent for everything I've personally needed to do in 3D thus far though. (Mostly models / animations for use in game engines.)

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It is a stretch to call Blender a CAD. What I think distinguishes parametric CADs is that in Blender you edit the body while in CAD you edit a set of operations that produce the body. This sequence is then processed by geometric modelling kernel to produce the end result. Editing and rendering is the easier part of it.

Sketcher mentioned is probably letting you create dimension accurate objects by hand, but it is far from being a proper CAD.

A 5s check of the documentation (so I may be way off), looks like Sketcher co-opts blender's UI to make it a front end to a CAD app (SolveSpace). So it does get you operations modeled to geometry like a real CAD app.

Blender doesn't support STEP file import or export, so it is not a viable CAD program. The add-on is probably great for creating dimensioned parts for use in animations and other things Blender does. But there is no interoperability with manufacturing or simulation tools.

Thanks for all the responses. As I said, I'm not a "CAD guy", so I didn't really know for sure, but now at least (thanks to y'all folks) I have a somewhat better understanding where "the line" between Blender 3D (and similar programs like Maya, Lightwave 3D, etc) and CAD actually lies. ;)

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