[mikewarot]

The learning curve was steep, but FreeCAD has allowed me to start playing with 3d printing gears and other things on my Bambu Lab P1S. I'm largely self taught with electronics and programming, so just starting and making small experiments got me going. For inspiration, there are lots of sites that share 3d print designs.

[justaj]

Would you say Blender is a nice tool for this purpose? I'd much rather learn one graphical tool which does a lot of different stuff than lots of different graphical tools that do different specific things (it's a different story in the terminal though :))

[AnIrishDuck]

Blender is serviceable for simple stuff, but you really want CAD for mechanical parts.

Think figurines (Blender) vs gears (CAD).

Constraints, among many other important features, just aren't as well represented in Blender.

An analogy is C vs JavaScript. Can you do "memory management" in JavaScript? Sure, but you're fighting the tool. Ditto for building a complex frontend in C.

The desire to "just learn one thing" is naturally strong. But the "design 3d things" problem space is as large (if not larger) than "programming computers". Hence the proliferation of tools with very different approaches (the underlying representation in CAD is generally brep [1], which is much different than vertices / edges / faces at the core of Blender)

The good news is the underlying thinking is somewhat transferrable, especially for core concepts.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_representation

[Geee]

It's not really suitable. Blender uses polygonal modeling, which is quite limiting. It's possible but very difficult compared to CAD, unless you're modeling something organic like human figures.

I'm currently using Shapr3D and it's very quick to design simple parts. Blender doesn't have any of the tools which I'm using in Shapr3D, such as sketches, constraints, parametric modeling etc. and most of the direct modeling tools are just way easier to use than Blender.

[baq]

Fusion 360 is an absolute beast of a tool if you’re willing to live with its license and can spend a few hours learning it.

Blender is for modeling, not CADing.

[adornKey]

Parametric modelling isn't really there in Blender, but Blender is too good to not use. And it is still improving at an astonishing rate.

For me Blender has all I need for creating Models for 3D-Printing. And if e.g. Geometry-Nodes get some more love in Blender, they could become a base for proper parametric modelling...