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Comment by beering | Hacker News Reader

That answer is still correct, which is that Blender's workflow and concept of 3D geometry is good for making nice pictures that don't need "correctness", but not what you want for mechanical engineering.

FreeCAD tries to be like SolidWorks/AutoDesk Inventor, and I think you'll find the workflow much better suited for designing mechanical parts in a precise way. Last I tried FreeCAD, it felt pretty alpha quality, but that was a long time ago.

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Not trying to disagree with your point, but the company I work for built a design tool on top of blender that feeds custom designs to our automated mill. The customer gets a high quality 3d render to approve before materials are cut & packaged. It seems to work well. Maybe we are an edge case.

Are the items being cut all in planar sheets rather than organic surfaces?

eg things like a box, or IKEA furniture, assembled from flat sheets after being cut out.

Am kind of thinking Blender's lack of "proper" geometry might not matter much for that scenario.

Not really sure how it could be worked around well for more complex geometry though. :)

Yes sir

Blender is not a professional CAD software, but "good for making nice pictures" is understating its abilities; as a hobbyist I've modeled a dozen or so objects for 3D printing and they slice/print just fine.

There are even plugins to analyze models in Blender, and plugins for CURA to open blender files.

https://daler.github.io/blender-for-3d-printing/printing/mes...

https://thopiekar.eu/cura/cad/blender/

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