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Blender 4.3

(www.blender.org)
241 points antome | 2 comments | 20 Nov 24 04:39 UTC | HN request time: 0.416s | source
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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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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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rounce ◴[20 Nov 24 11:55 UTC] No.42193041[source]▶
Why? They’re fundamentally different applications for different purposes.
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1. 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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2. rounce ◴[20 Nov 24 13:24 UTC] No.42193738[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.