Blender + FreeCAD

[jakob]

I have been trying to learn blender lately. And its looks great then I render that I miss in FreeCAD. But I am not sure if I ever can use Blender for making products that need high accuracy. What do you say about this?

[shoogen]

The main difference is that Blender relies on meshes. It is an animation tool. It does not requires the meshes to be watertight. In FreeCAD or any other real CAD program a circle has an exact representation. But once you work on meshes you can't tell anymore if the 32-sided polygon was meant to be a circle.
If your product an animation or brochure or a computer game, blender is a the right tool for you. If your need technical drawings or want to use the geometry data with CAM, you should stick to FreeCAD.

[bejant]

I am not sure if I ever can use Blender for making products that need high accuracy. What do you say about this?

What type of products do you want to make, and what do you mean by the term "make"? If you want to make computer graphics or 3D print an item, Blender would work. But as shoogen stated, if you need curves to actually be curves (and not tiny line segments) or you need cylinders to actually be cylinders (and not a bunch of triangles) you you can accurately CNC machine a product, Blender isn't the right program.

If you do a google search for "precision modeling in blender" you'll get some good search results that may help you decide.

[jakob]

Thx, I am just learning blender and it's good to know the difference. I miss the option to do great renders in freecad, but I was reading the FreeCAD's docs and I think that will soon be possible to do easier. To choose material and render realistic. Today I get the same view when I export to povray or luxrenderer.

[yorik]

It's pretty easy to switch between freecad and blender, just export your stuff to the OBJ format, which reads well in Blender. And all your objects are separated, easy to add materials and update when some of them change...