[elaus]

I too feel like the latest versions are quite a big improvement and I finally lost that feeling of slowing myself down just for the sake of using OSS.

But I still hope for a "blender moment" where a concerted effort gets rid of old cruft, improves UI/UX and jump-starts growth (also in developers/funding) and further improvements.

[dgroshev]

It's probably impossible for FreeCAD to catch up with the industry-standard CAD systems (SOLIDWORKS, NX, Fusion) unless they somehow pour a stupendous amount of money into their geometry kernel [1].

All major CAD systems use mature geometry kernels like Parasolid [2]. Parasolid was developed for 40 years and is still in active development. This is the piece of code that enables CAD systems to do things like computing an intersection of a G3 smooth fillet with embossed text, handling all corner cases.

FreeCAD runs on OpenCASCADE [3], which is both less sophisticated today and is slower to gain new features than Parasolid, being seemingly maintained by one person [4]. FreeCAD's geometry is hard limited by what OpenCASCADE can do.

This is the main difference from Blender. Blender ultimately operates on vertices, which doesn't require nearly the same level of inherent complexity. Blender isn't bottlenecked in what it can do like FreeCAD is.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_modeling_kernel

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology

[4]: https://github.com/Open-Cascade-SAS/OCCT/commits/master/

[iFire]

As part of my donated work in Godot Engine, my approach is to improve manifold https://github.com/elalish/manifold to get a "geometric kernel"

I think I've succeeded and many CAD tools use manifold for geometric kernels on 3d boundary meshes.

I was able to get Godot Engine and Blender to adopt elalish/manifold.

List of CAD tools that adopted elalish/manifold.

OpenSCAD Blender IFCjs Nomad Sculpt Grid.Space badcad Godot Engine OCADml Flitter BRL-CAD PolygonJS Spherene Babylon.js trimesh Gypsum Valence 3D bitbybit.dev PythonOpenSCAD Conversation AnchorSCAD Dactyl Web Configurator Arcol Bento3D SKÅPA Cadova BREP.io Otterplans Bracket Engineer

[ezst]

You are correct in that OpenCASCADE is less refined than parasolid, but I would argue that most people just don't need it. Practically, FreeCAD is fit for all purposes, except those for which you require knowledge of what a geometric kernel even is, and then you know who you are and how to serve yourself.

[qiine]

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.

[JDye]

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,.

[qiine]

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!

[kevin_thibedeau]

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

[phkahler]

>> 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.

[qiine]

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.

[ezst]

Oh gosh, please no.