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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

CAD software is hard. That's why it is expensive and has lots of bugs. It is super easy to make something that is 5% or so of a CAD program that will look impressive, will be super fast and feels like a huge improvement.

And then you add the other 95%. By that time it will be just as slow as the incumbent, even more buggy and the interface will look like crap and will be hard to learn.

As the author of a CAD/CAM package I remember clearly that the only way to stay out of that trap was to make it a niche thing. Of which there are 1000's none of them interoperable with the rest.

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Well I hear a lot of praise about Fusion 360. So it's not all bad.

And I don't agree with your statement. Blender is a great example for this. Although it is not constraint based it is a full feature package which is very fast. Compare this to 3dsMax which is exactly what you describe.

Blender should be considered a true gem of the open source community. But the first UIs were confusing at best and infuriating at worst.

I believe Blender's UI is still confusing and is infuriating to me.

Disclaimer: I am an amateur when it comes to 3D modelling, but I was able to figure out pretty much everything I needed to make things in Lightwave back in the 90's, but even after watching several tutorials I still struggle with Blender.

Blender 2.8 has a new redesigned user interface that is a lot easier to use. It's definitely worth trying again if you haven't recently! It's still insanely complicated of course, but that just comes with the territory. There are many great tutorials available, but make sure you're looking at recent ones, since so much has changed for the better in 2.8.

I am just a rudimentary 3D artist. I’ve used Cheetah3D, which is basically a “toy” app, for some branding work; but that’s about the extent of my exposure. I have never used Blender, or AutoDesk.

I know some folks that are a lot more experienced than I am, with 3D modeling, and they all say that Blender is very powerful, but the UX is incomprehensible. At least one of them is MENSA-level smart, so that says a lot.

I’m wondering if Blender is sort of like X11, where people have been declaring the end of the Microsoft/Apple hegemony for decades, or GIMP, where people have been declaring the end of the Adobe hegemony for years.

I will say that I am very impressed with the quality of the 3D work being done, these days. I see works like Worth Enough?[0] (which is actually over a decade old), and believe that 3D art is now every bit as valid as “classic” media. I suspect that the tools are a big reason for that. When oil was added to early media like tempera, the quality of art improved. I think that Blender is used for a lot of this work, so it can’t be that bad.

[0] https://www.deviantart.com/radoxist/art/Worth-enough-7324787...

Blender and Fusion on the geometry editing level are completely different beasts. Blender uses and edits meshes. Fusion360 and other CAD software primarily work on boundary representations which effectively represents a volume as a set of equations for surfaces and topological graph data. It allows for some neat operations but also makes it extremely difficult to handle correctly and a lot of the work in handling these operations is covering edge cases.

"Not constraint based" = not CAD software.

Fusion 360 on the other hand is not a scratch-built product, but uses the same kernel as Autodesk Inventor, ShapeManager - which is based on ACIS, of which version 1.0 was written in 1985. That gives you an idea of how friggin hard it is to write a decent CAD kernel - all the commercial ones are decades old.

The only real free software CAD kernel is OpenCASCADE.

The best parametric 3D CAD kernel now has SolveSpace, and it's open source. Much better than ACIS and OpenCASCADE. It's very young though.

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