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Comment by SchemaLoad | Hacker News Reader

Depends if your goal is artistic or functional. Blender is good if you are trying to make character models, etc. It's not great when you are trying to make a part that has to fit something in the real world and after printing you discover one step half way through needs to be 1mm shorter.

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You can make a part in a way where you are sure of the tolerance, and you can do the opposite in blender. They have measuring tools and you can be pretty precise.

It does take a different set of skills to regular CAD, but I haven't found it that bad for simple 3D printed models that need to be dimensionally accurate.

I have used it to make quite a few functional prints, with the help of making sure my scene units are correct and a CAD plugin.

I haven't tried any of the cad plugins for blender, but I'm not sure how you would retroactively change dimensions in blender. It's usually simple enough to create features to a certain size, but if you need to change them later it becomes significantly difficult.

If I put some holes in something that are 1mm from the edge, but then I print it and see it doesn't line up and needs to be 1.5mm, in Fusion I can just change one number and it all updates. Doing the same thing in blender would likely be very difficult.

thats still pretty easy in blender, just takes a different approach! Goto edit mode in the part, goto vertex mode, wireframe view, select all of the vertexs for the hole on both sides of the solid part, then move then (in the right selection mode) in the proper direction using your keyboard to move the exact amount needed. Depending on the specifics needed, you can setup custom axis and such to move them anywhere needed (lets say you needed the hole .5mm but 45deg from the current one ref'd from a specific edge).

The same thing can be said for resizing whole faces, moving parts, etc... Its all possible and usually pretty easy to do, just takes a different mentality from that of a parametric modeller.

Select the verts, drag them in the right direction. A little pane pops up saying you moved them by .78 mm. Change it to .5mm and you're done.

If you're using boolean operations to make the holes just move the hole-cutter. Same method.

Blender is not a perfect tool for creating 3d prints but it is a capable tool.

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