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Blender 4.3

(www.blender.org)
239 points antome | 10 comments | 20 Nov 24 04:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.785s | source | bottom
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eblanshey ◴[20 Nov 24 10:56 UTC] No.42192703[source]▶
Like others have mentioned, Blender has become quite the successful open-source story. They used to be riddled with bugs and UX issues, much like FreeCAD was. Yesterday FreeCAD released v1 of their software, and they seem to be on the same redemption path as Blender. It's too bad their v1 release didn't gain much traction on here, as more people ought to give FreeCAD another whirl. The improvements there are massive. And it's the only proper parametric CAD software available on Linux.
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1. amelius ◴[20 Nov 24 11:09 UTC] No.42192766[source]▶
To what extent can Blender replace FreeCAD for mechanical engineering purposes?
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2. cultofmetatron ◴[20 Nov 24 11:37 UTC] No.42192916[source]▶
I would say avoid it. blender is an excellent MESH modeler but that puts it fundamentally at odds with being a good parametric modeler. a parametric modeler's base primitives are based in deformations on solid objects. mesh modelers are just vertices connected by line segments where 3 form a face. servicable if you're just doing simple objects for a 3d printer but disastrous if you need precision.
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3. rounce ◴[20 Nov 24 11:55 UTC] No.42193041[source]▶
Why? They’re fundamentally different applications for different purposes.
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4. amelius ◴[20 Nov 24 11:58 UTC] No.42193072[source]▶
I don't understand why precision would be an issue? Is it not possible to fix the position of vertices to sub-micron precision?

I know that Blender is used more in the movie industry. But what if I wanted to make, say, an animation of some cartoon character that gets shredded in a gearbox? What program would I use?

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5. amelius ◴[20 Nov 24 12:01 UTC] No.42193099[source]▶
I was thinking that since Blender has physics simulation, and it also has nice video renderings, that would be two great reasons to use it for mechanical designs with moving parts, for example.

But I don't have much experience in designing parts. I like SolveSpace, but it becomes slow for medium/large designs. I know FreeCAD has a lot of problems with stability and UI consistency, so I avoided it.

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6. regularfry ◴[20 Nov 24 12:26 UTC] No.42193308[source]▶
Rigging. The assembly bits in FreeCAD just haven't been great historically, and the Ondsel assembly layer is very new. If you want to visually check for clashes I can see how someone might prefer to just import a bunch of STLs into Blender, rig them up, and wiggle them about.
7. rounce ◴[20 Nov 24 13:24 UTC] No.42193738{3}[source]▶
FreeCAD has more rigorous simulation features - FEM/FEA, mechanical assembly, CAM path generation and simulation, and robotics to name a few - out of the box which makes sense as it’s for engineering rather than art, and there are additional addons for CFD and sheet metal available among many others.

The recent 1.0 update brought some major UI/UX improvements, though if you’re coming from other software you’ll find the Ribbon addon to be extremely helpful to feel comfortable. I think it gets a lot of over the top criticism given there are more people working on just the Autodesk CAD kernel than the entirety of FreeCAD and its dependencies. The rate of improvement is gradually accelerating and its already a big jump from where it was a few years ago.

8. rounce ◴[20 Nov 24 14:05 UTC] No.42194027{3}[source]▶
A curve in a parametric CAD program will have an internal representation which is perfectly smooth. As rather than being than a set of straight lines (edges) connected by vertices it is instead a mathematical description of a curve which has infinite resolution.

For your animation example Blender would be the appropriate tool to use as you are doing stuff that requires flexibility of form rather than precision.

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9. amelius ◴[20 Nov 24 14:23 UTC] No.42194142{4}[source]▶
Aha, so it is a bit like bitmap versus vector graphics in 2d painting programs.
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10. rounce ◴[20 Nov 24 17:44 UTC] No.42196389{5}[source]▶
Yeah somewhat, there’s also the thing where mesh models can potentially have no thickness (eg. a single polygon) as well as gaps in the mesh whereas this is (usually) impossible in the case of a parametric model.