Hacker News Reader

Comment by qiine | Hacker News Reader

I kinda wish blender could just do CAD honestly,

It feels like all those 3D modeling apps like 3DSmax,Fusion even Zbrush share like 90% of their feature set but your are forced to literally juggle(for videogame dev at least) because of one or two arguably extremely niche capability.

View on HN

It may look like they're all easily interchangable because the UI and actions are similar (you have a viewport and can do extrudes, etc..) but fundamentally, they're all working on very different objects at their core. Blender and 3DS Max are the most alike, but Zbrush is an entirely different paradigm and so is parametric CAD. An extrude in Blender is massively different from a pad in FreeCAD.

Maybe, with a ton of time and effort the blender UI could be abstracted from most of the box-modeling approach and then pasted over a different paradigm, but It'd take tens of thousands of hours I imagine,.

You can do sculpting in Blender as well as parametric objects, similarly you can emulate most of substance designer with shaders, maybe just not _quite_ good enough that's the thing.

It feels like we have been so so close to an unified 3D content creation tool kit for many years now!

Blender is a mesh editor at its heart. That isn't suitable for CAD work.

>> I kinda wish blender could just do CAD honestly

Have you tried the "CAD sketcher" add-on? I think Blender should have similar functionality built-in, but for now this looks like a nice add-on.

Blender is a very very long way from being used as a general purpose CAD tool, and IMHO it should not strive to be that. But having this ability to do simple CAD designs without opening and learning a different program is cool.

That's my opinion but I think that game/cinema/whatever 3D modeling should lean more and more toward CAD like workflow.

If we want to bring those medium to the next level.

Oh gosh, please no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com