Freecad for users of Blender

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aanastasiou
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Freecad for users of Blender

Post by aanastasiou »

Hello

I love FreeCAD for the precision (and the gold feature of Dimensions) but Blender for the interface and ease of modelling, so my question is: Is there any resource that draws parallels between Blender and FreeCAD? (Along the lines of: "Where in Blender you do this by XYZ, in FreeCAD, you can do it via ABC").

There are similar "cheatsheets" (although I really dislike this term) for transitioning between MATLAB and Numpy/Scipy for example.

Note here that I am not talking about how to import something one built in Blender in FreeCAD but emulating common Blender actions with Freecad.

Is it possible to do approximate positioning with the mouse for example, using something like "Grab" and then refine through the "Position" fields?
Is it possible to extrude similarly to Blender? (I am sure it is but I am still looking for it).

All the best
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yorik
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Re: Freecad for users of Blender

Post by yorik »

I don't think that exists yet, but it's a very good idea.. Only takes a motivated person to start writing it! ;)
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kkremitzki
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Re: Freecad for users of Blender

Post by kkremitzki »

aanastasiou wrote: Fri Feb 22, 2019 1:01 pm There are similar "cheatsheets" (although I really dislike this term)
Me too, I prefer the term "rosetta" as in Rosetta Stone, a way of translation.
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flowwie
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Re: Freecad for users of Blender

Post by flowwie »

Im thinking about doing something like this because I made the transition myself in 2011 when I switched from 3D graphics and animation (cinema 4D and Blender) to CAD (Siemens NX, Catia and now FreeCAD).
Sounds pretty interesting but so far I'm doing my tutorial videos all in German.

Kind regards
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Celica_Supra

Re: Freecad for users of Blender

Post by Celica_Supra »

Myself and Allvisuals4U have collaborated to create a FreeCAD/Blender rendering series. Not really on the topic but it's the closest thing I've got.

Here is the playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... qF4Vpz21Ut
aanastasiou
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Re: Freecad for users of Blender

Post by aanastasiou »

Hey, many thanks to all for your answers and pointers to other resources.

I hope someone decides to give it a go at something like this, I feel that it would be really useful to make the transition. I am currently around the 30min mark for things that take 10 minutes (or even less) to model relatively accurately in Blender and most of the time is spent looking up "How is this called in FreeCAD"? :)

All the best
openBrain
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Re: Freecad for users of Blender

Post by openBrain »

Just out of curiosity, what workbenches are you using Blender guys ? :)
AFAIK from both softwares, find similarities between Blender & FC (or commercially speaking Maya & Solidworks) is just like trying the same between a painting easel and a drawing board...
Roughly I would say that Blender is for artists and FreeCAD for engineers. :lol:
That's not judgement, it's just interest about existing parallels between both softwares. ;)
Celica_Supra

Re: Freecad for users of Blender

Post by Celica_Supra »

I totally agree with Openbrain, FreeCAD is engineering oriented and Blender is artistic. I am not experienced on the modeling side of blender. Freecad is a parametric modeler where every modeled feature is able to be defined by hard dimensioning, has a history tree etc whereas in my limited experience with Blender, it has more of a direct modeling approach which makes organic surfacing WAYY easier, but doesn't have the hard dimensioning/sketching/history tree available. I think the core of this conversation is trying to translate understanding between direct modeling and parametric modeling. It might be helpful to think almost like in Blender, what your working with is almost like clay and it can be molded around using a number of different tools. In FreeCAD you generally use sketches to create features, and the sketches can be extruded, lofted, revolved, swept etc. In my opinion a free software called Design Spark Mechanical has characteristics of both parametric and direct modeling, and playing around with it might be a good intermediate between the two programs.


FYI I spend almost all my time on the part design workbench so there are probably some direct modeling capabilities of FreeCAD that I haven't used.

For anyone interested:
https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/m ... l-software
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Kunda1
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Re: Freecad for users of Blender

Post by Kunda1 »

It would be super cool to have some sort of tutorial that translates blender-speak in to FreeCAD-speak.
Or How do I do this in FreeCAD if I'm a blender user type of thing.
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openBrain
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Re: Freecad for users of Blender

Post by openBrain »

Kunda1 wrote: Thu Feb 28, 2019 6:05 pm It would be super cool to have some sort of tutorial that translates blender-speak in to FreeCAD-speak.
Or How do I do this in FreeCAD if I'm a blender user type of thing.
Unfortunately I doubt it would be easily doable.
I mostly use Blender for texturing/animating/rendering but I know in it some really artist features (like modeling with mouse as if the mesh was in a virtual modeling clay) that won't have any similar ones in FC. And vice-versa.
Despite I would be very interested in !
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