[an_aparallel]

Blender is a bunch of things - but it is not, 1)a parametric program. 2)deals with complex geometry as mesh, VS nurbs 3) isnt really built to dimension 4)isnt really built for generating documentation which 99% of teh time is primary output of these programs - 2d sheets.

You can use it for 3d printing - but for engineering...nope. The Autodesk family of products / Solidworks are defacto for a reason - they have decades of tooling, libraries and so on that make lightwork of complex tasks. I'd tear my hair out trying to do my work in Blender which i easily do in Inventor, Autocad or Revit.

[Joel_Mckay]

There are constraint based CAD addons for blender, and the black art of Geometry node rendering pipelines to auto-generate objects/features. There is also the fact most of the system is open Python API based, and thus everything can be generated from code.

However, Blender was not meant to be a constraint based CAD/CAM package.

Solidworks still seems like the leader in offline mode, but parametric-everything FreeCad is evolving at an astonishing rate.

For critical professional work, gambling on opensource is still inappropriate most of the time. =3

[an_aparallel]

I'm keen on trying freecad 1.0. After professional training in engineering drafting, I'm interested to see if I can get by with a lot more understanding of the processes.