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Thanks a lot for the shoutout 😁very appreciated! I'm happy and proud to be part of this massive undertaking, let's get CAD Sketcher production-ready for everyone!
The performance is reeeeally poor in slightly complicated designs unfortunately, that's the biggest barrier for me. I have a 24-thread 3900X and a 3070 Ti and I dont think it should struggle this hard at drawing like 20 boxes. Eventually it's so slow to highlight and manipulate things that it becomes unusable. This problem isn't present in the software CAD Sketcher is based on, so it has to be something with the drawing method chosen for the Blender add-on.
@@SkeleTonHammer That is in fact entirely correct! There's some known bottlenecks in CAD Sketcher at this point ; the reality of software engineering however dictates that optimization _has_ to be the very last step of the process, so sadly we'll only get to address this near the very end of the current big push. Hopefully you'll come back to CAD Sketcher once we implement those optimizations :-)
Hi thanks so much for CAD sketcher, I'm just getting into it. Really useful as I don't need to use other CAD programmes when making projects in Blender. For example, some projects, as well as 3D prints for my art, I sometimes need to make precision connection things etc. I look forward to seeing it developing and learning from now! I knew about this a while ago but was tutoring some people Blender last week as a University Lab and one really recommended it so I took another look and love all the progress/updates/new features. CAD sketcher definitely getting known in the maker community now :)
Hopefully you guys can add a redundant checkbox shortcut in your interface to make Blender's UI cursor normal snapping less clunky. Blender peeps may not see the value in this update but for a CAD nerd this is pretty huge. Being able to copy, move a sketch relative an origin, or paste to a new plane requires a lot more planning and troubleshooting in CAD. You guys made it so smooth. Nice work.
a better way to align 3d cursor to orient to face is that- goto preferences- keymap- search for set 3d cursor (or by key-binding-Shift RMB), expand the options of keymap and check surface project and orientation to geometry. now you dont have to change snap options each time.
--IMPORTANT!-- WE'RE GOING TO NEED A COMPLETELY NEW & UP TO DATE SET OF TUTORIALS! I have CAD Sketcher. I've installed it. But I gave up on trying to use it because the tutorials are so out of date and scrambled. Many of the tutorials are so out of date that features that have been added aren't covered at all, but later tutorials talk about using these new features in conjunction with older features that are no longer in the same place in the updated U.I., so that in order to use the new features in conjunction with the older features requires hunting BLINDLY for where to find the older features in the newer U.I.. THE CURRENT PLAYLIST OF TUTORIALS IS SO OUT OF DATE THAT IT'S CONFUSING, AND BORDERS ON USELESS. Please put as much effort into providing a whole new playlist of tutorials as you have in adding all these new features and de-bugging them. After all, what good is CAD Sketcher if you don't know how to use it properly?
When designating an object face as the work plane, the center point of the object face is captured, but the vertex of the object face is not captured. Is there any way to work relative to the vertices of an object face?
I'm currently using sketchup to model architecture interiors and importing them into Blender for the mesh work. Hopefully Cad Sketcher will solve many problems of simple object spline based creation in Blender. If you get this going you will put a nail in the coffin of 3dsmax as well.
Hello. Thank you for always giving me a good solution. I'm leaving a question because there's a problem. Updated from 0.25 to 0.27. The main point of this update is copy and paste, but in my case, copy and paste is not working in sketch mode. The same goes for Shift+D. How can we solve it?
Can not get CAD Sketcher to find Solverspace. Add-on installed and with PIP I installed Solverspace library but CAD Sketcher can't find it. I am running Linux Mint 21 and blender 3.4.1 with CAD Sketcher 0.27.1. I have 20 years of CAD experience (Ideas, NX, CATIA) So the basics of CAD Sketcher In know. Just need to get past this problem. Thanks for any help in advance.
I'm trying to run this on linux as I think it would be absolutely brilliant since all the CAD softwares on linux are just terrible. But lots and lots of times after creating a sketch of a circle in blender, my whole system just crashes... any fixes? Thanks in advance
That's the hopes! If we can get this big enough we can then get enough funding and developments to start to really make some BIG changes to the NURBS workflow in blender But no promises. But one can dream right?
Hi MakerTales, I’ve been recently trying to get CAD Sketcher on Blender and it just has r been working out for me! I’ve tried the purchase and installation steps in tutorial videos and Blender just can’t seem to recognize the file when I install it. I’m running a MacBook Air with M1, so I’m not sure if this addon is Windows only. Please help, it would mean a ton!
You got me excited about CAD Sketcher and your Academy. Thought I would give it a spin around the block (CAD sketcher). It is not an easy ADD-On to add to Python. It requires Solvespace. Now that I have Solvespace, just downloaded 3.1, it says it needs the module to be registered. What is frustrating is that I cannot get CAD Sketcher to work. Please could you show how to add CAD Sketcher to Blender and set it up to run smoothly. You may have this video already, if so please point the way, The only videos of yours that I can see, show it up and running. Thanks
@@proza1957 I don't know if it's the same problem that you guys have been having, but I had a frustrating problem involving Solvespace when trying to install CAD Sketcher (Blender 3.51 on M1 Mac). I was following the install instructions, but was getting error messages I couldn't make sense of when trying to switch on the installed Add-on. It seems either it or Solvespace (I can't remember which) are incompatible with the newer "Metal" used on M1 Macs. If you are using an M1 Mac, you have to go into _Blender Preferences > System > GPU Backend_ and switch it from "Metal" to "OpenGL". When I did this, CAD Sketcher worked immediately. Solvespace was already bundled with Blender and I didn't need to download or install anything extra. It works fine when switched to "OpenGL" but the downside is that this is a bit slower than "Metal" at rendering. I only found this out as I joined the Discord for CAD Sketcher and somebody else had the same problem and another user mentioned the simple solution. It's kinda annoying that there's not even a note about this in the installation instructions anywhere, and there's no way for the average user to work out what the problem was, let alone the solution. Hope that helps in some way.
re-factoring seems like a bit to ask for at this point but has there been any consideration on having cad sketcher written in Rust or something thats more performant? Since the project is so young it does seem like a problem to lock yourselves into python.
We have to as it's a "blender" addon. (From my limited understanding of blender addon development ) And trust me some very VERY smart people have taken a good look at the code base and a refactor is VERY much needed for extendability and so much more!
@@Keep-Making ah I wasn't aware of that constraint. That really stinks to hear. I am excited for this project in any case and will start playing with blender for the first time as a result. edit: ah looks like there is some finangling that can be done with cython and either filing or linking with at least C or C++ when it comes to blender add-ons because its a python module.
Anything stopping me from building nice mechanical kinematic animations with CADSketcher entities? Just curious if there are any known gotchas before I sink some time into this. Thanks!
This could really become something really big, f360 kinda have the monopoly of nurbs generation over a mesh with really smooth features difficult to make in the first place in cad, would be awesome to be able to convert a mesh to a nurbs that can later be used in a milling environment
Still not seeing how this can fly for anything past small maker 3D CAD stuff without proper NURBS support. Without it, you'll start running into topology issues that will propagate across your entire part as operations like booleans start destroying your mesh.
@@benveasey7474 I've seen a few plasticity videos and nobody demonstrates it being used for parametric modeling, master sketch modelling or similar, so I have no idea if this tool works for stuff which has to have constrained dimensions with measurements which might have to be adjusted later in the process without destroying the entire part.
fusion 360 does the sketching very simply, you go to totally different mode for sketching, and they are separate objects, why not add a top bar window mode selection instead of the mixed mode what?
@@Jkauppa Very dismissive comment, not useful. I am not affiliated with thisproject, but I have to say you obviously dont have a clue how large software is made. Intuitive and simply working is a long way ahead of many incremental improvements. This tool like many other authoring tools is built bottom-up, starting from enabling features and then adding on layers on top that simplify using them.
Please can we have 2D technical drawings native to Blender...it would honestly be a game changer. The PRJ add-on and BlenderBIM can be tricky in this respect.
I thought about asking them about it, but I think they should stick with their core strengths. Their budget looks pretty tight. I made some sheet templates that I can append to any blend file and works good. The measurable addon can help with dimensions. Having a 2D workspace similar to grease pencil would be pretty nice though.
@@modelenginerding6996 The thing I struggle with using Measurable is if I need different sections in a large building. Making instances of the building for the different views isn't really practical.
I've been using blender for 4+ years and recently I started needing more precision in my models, something only professional CADs could offer. It feels SO good that I don't need to switch to something like Fusion360 for this and can stay with the app I love! I'm really excited and looking forward to the add-on's development! 👏🏻
is there a simple SENSIBLE way to get documentation for cad Sketcher? every site seems to take me in circles. I'm impressed with your portrayal of Cad Sketcher and want to learn enough to use it if your group would make a straightforward way to get instruction and I'd be willing to pay for it As is I wont be led down the garden path by confusing and useless documentation sites. I'll take documentation free UNLESS ACTUAL DOCUMENTATION IS PROVIDED I realize that with ongoing changes documentation might work strangely or not at all) All I would like is a set of instructions for the current level.please note. This ranting concerns the usage instruction sites, absolutely not your fine video
This is so awesome! I've been nearly a year into leading an opensource project, developing an isomorphic (microtunable) laser cut & 3D printed synthesizer/MIDI keyboard. We couldn't have done it without you all!
I'm really enjoying this addon, it actually has become my main CAD tool!! I have a question too, there is a way to wipe all the Cadsketcher information in a blend file? I did a duplicate to work in a variation of what I did but I can't remove all the entities completely. Great thanks!
I'm so excited! I was looking for something to use, instead of Fusion 360, in which I could make CAD based files 3D and sell them. This is so perfect. I'm usually making something for work where we repair computers but we're a small shop and I don't expect to have a large amount of income from the designs yet. I'm already working on learning blender so for it to do what I'm used to is a HUGE jump in functionality for me! Thank you guys so much for developing this! I'll try to donate some in the future.
To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/MakerTales/. The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.
Thanks a lot for the shoutout 😁very appreciated! I'm happy and proud to be part of this massive undertaking, let's get CAD Sketcher production-ready for everyone!
Absolutely!
I can't wait!
The performance is reeeeally poor in slightly complicated designs unfortunately, that's the biggest barrier for me. I have a 24-thread 3900X and a 3070 Ti and I dont think it should struggle this hard at drawing like 20 boxes. Eventually it's so slow to highlight and manipulate things that it becomes unusable. This problem isn't present in the software CAD Sketcher is based on, so it has to be something with the drawing method chosen for the Blender add-on.
@@SkeleTonHammer That is in fact entirely correct! There's some known bottlenecks in CAD Sketcher at this point ; the reality of software engineering however dictates that optimization _has_ to be the very last step of the process, so sadly we'll only get to address this near the very end of the current big push. Hopefully you'll come back to CAD Sketcher once we implement those optimizations :-)
Yessaaas!!! I'm glad my small donation helped move this along, thanks for all your work!!!
I really think if you Guys keep this up Blender will be one of the biggest partners also in the cnc world Great job
I'm using blender as my ONLY cad tool now for 3d printing thanks to Sketcher.
Awesome to hear that Armadous!
Hi thanks so much for CAD sketcher, I'm just getting into it. Really useful as I don't need to use other CAD programmes when making projects in Blender. For example, some projects, as well as 3D prints for my art, I sometimes need to make precision connection things etc. I look forward to seeing it developing and learning from now! I knew about this a while ago but was tutoring some people Blender last week as a University Lab and one really recommended it so I took another look and love all the progress/updates/new features. CAD sketcher definitely getting known in the maker community now :)
Now it becomes interesting for supporting this development... 👍
A lot of respect to you and project you made for Blender community!
Hopefully you guys can add a redundant checkbox shortcut in your interface to make Blender's UI cursor normal snapping less clunky. Blender peeps may not see the value in this update but for a CAD nerd this is pretty huge. Being able to copy, move a sketch relative an origin, or paste to a new plane requires a lot more planning and troubleshooting in CAD. You guys made it so smooth. Nice work.
a better way to align 3d cursor to orient to face is that- goto preferences- keymap- search for set 3d cursor (or by key-binding-Shift RMB), expand the options of keymap and check surface project and orientation to geometry. now you dont have to change snap options each time.
thank you! Your tip makes me so thrilled!~
Nice update! Have you seen Mesh Machine on the blender market? Mildly pricey, but it seems to solve the bevel problem and a lot more, too.
hmmm, this is starting to get interesting. I really didn't think that you'd be able to pull it off but this could actually turn out useful.
I was wondering about the new updates, when I searched it today I couldn't find anything then you have uploaded the video ahaha
Thanks for the info
--IMPORTANT!--
WE'RE GOING TO NEED A COMPLETELY NEW & UP TO DATE SET OF TUTORIALS!
I have CAD Sketcher. I've installed it. But I gave up on trying to use it because the tutorials are so out of date and scrambled.
Many of the tutorials are so out of date that features that have been added aren't covered at all, but later tutorials talk about using these new features in conjunction with older features that are no longer in the same place in the updated U.I., so that in order to use the new features in conjunction with the older features requires hunting BLINDLY for where to find the older features in the newer U.I..
THE CURRENT PLAYLIST OF TUTORIALS IS SO OUT OF DATE THAT IT'S CONFUSING, AND BORDERS ON USELESS.
Please put as much effort into providing a whole new playlist of tutorials as you have in adding all these new features and de-bugging them.
After all, what good is CAD Sketcher if you don't know how to use it properly?
When designating an object face as the work plane, the center point of the object face is captured, but the vertex of the object face is not captured. Is there any way to work relative to the vertices of an object face?
I'm currently using sketchup to model architecture interiors and importing them into Blender for the mesh work. Hopefully Cad Sketcher will solve many problems of simple object spline based creation in Blender. If you get this going you will put a nail in the coffin of 3dsmax as well.
Nice to see ya
I did love blender but bevel is so hard. As a result, I gave up on blender for 3d print model after watching your whole series.
On this iteration of cad sketcher whenever I setup a new sketch on a face the original sketch disappears until it is converted to mesh
Hello. Thank you for always giving me a good solution. I'm leaving a question because there's a problem. Updated from 0.25 to 0.27. The main point of this update is copy and paste, but in my case, copy and paste is not working in sketch mode. The same goes for Shift+D.
How can we solve it?
I just updated to 3.4.1 not to long ago and re d/l'd CADSketcher and I ended up with 0.26. I guess I'm doing that again lol
Can not get CAD Sketcher to find Solverspace. Add-on installed and with PIP I installed Solverspace library but CAD Sketcher can't find it. I am running Linux Mint 21 and blender 3.4.1 with CAD Sketcher 0.27.1. I have 20 years of CAD experience (Ideas, NX, CATIA) So the basics of CAD Sketcher In know. Just need to get past this problem. Thanks for any help in advance.
why should cad sketcher 'find' solvespace ? Are they not doing the same job ?
Please we need Offset tool and more tools in cad sketcher 🙏
It's coming... Take a look at the roadmap!
The offset tool is actually planned for 1.0.0 🔥
Your tool is very good. Unfortunately I just noticed it does not work with Blender 3.5
I just tried to install it and it gave me several error lines.
Are you on M1 Mac? If so you need to switch the System GPU Backend from "Metal" to "OpenGL" in Blender Preferences.
I'm trying to run this on linux as I think it would be absolutely brilliant since all the CAD softwares on linux are just terrible. But lots and lots of times after creating a sketch of a circle in blender, my whole system just crashes... any fixes? Thanks in advance
Thank you for this important innovation. Are you thinking of adding NURBS in the future?
That's the hopes!
If we can get this big enough we can then get enough funding and developments to start to really make some BIG changes to the NURBS workflow in blender But no promises. But one can dream right?
@@Keep-MakingThanks for the reply. I think it will not be impossible for you. You are on the right track with this project.
Hi MakerTales,
I’ve been recently trying to get CAD Sketcher on Blender and it just has r been working out for me! I’ve tried the purchase and installation steps in tutorial videos and Blender just can’t seem to recognize the file when I install it. I’m running a MacBook Air with M1, so I’m not sure if this addon is Windows only.
Please help, it would mean a ton!
You got me excited about CAD Sketcher and your Academy. Thought I would give it a spin around the block (CAD sketcher). It is not an easy ADD-On to add to Python. It requires Solvespace. Now that I have Solvespace, just downloaded 3.1, it says it needs the module to be registered. What is frustrating is that I cannot get CAD Sketcher to work.
Please could you show how to add CAD Sketcher to Blender and set it up to run smoothly. You may have this video already, if so please point the way, The only videos of yours that I can see, show it up and running.
Thanks
Have you had any luck getting Solvespace to work with CAD Sketcher?
@@proza1957 I don't know if it's the same problem that you guys have been having, but I had a frustrating problem involving Solvespace when trying to install CAD Sketcher (Blender 3.51 on M1 Mac). I was following the install instructions, but was getting error messages I couldn't make sense of when trying to switch on the installed Add-on. It seems either it or Solvespace (I can't remember which) are incompatible with the newer "Metal" used on M1 Macs.
If you are using an M1 Mac, you have to go into _Blender Preferences > System > GPU Backend_ and switch it from "Metal" to "OpenGL". When I did this, CAD Sketcher worked immediately. Solvespace was already bundled with Blender and I didn't need to download or install anything extra. It works fine when switched to "OpenGL" but the downside is that this is a bit slower than "Metal" at rendering.
I only found this out as I joined the Discord for CAD Sketcher and somebody else had the same problem and another user mentioned the simple solution. It's kinda annoying that there's not even a note about this in the installation instructions anywhere, and there's no way for the average user to work out what the problem was, let alone the solution. Hope that helps in some way.
re-factoring seems like a bit to ask for at this point but has there been any consideration on having cad sketcher written in Rust or something thats more performant? Since the project is so young it does seem like a problem to lock yourselves into python.
We have to as it's a "blender" addon. (From my limited understanding of blender addon development )
And trust me some very VERY smart people have taken a good look at the code base and a refactor is VERY much needed for extendability and so much more!
@@Keep-Making ah I wasn't aware of that constraint. That really stinks to hear. I am excited for this project in any case and will start playing with blender for the first time as a result.
edit: ah looks like there is some finangling that can be done with cython and either filing or linking with at least C or C++ when it comes to blender add-ons because its a python module.
Anything stopping me from building nice mechanical kinematic animations with CADSketcher entities? Just curious if there are any known gotchas before I sink some time into this. Thanks!
As long as you make linked duplicates of the sketch mesh to the animation rig then all should be fine.
Your "Download CAD Sketcher:" link is broken. Looks like it got cut off somehow.
Thanks for the heads up I'll go fix it now
This could really become something really big, f360 kinda have the monopoly of nurbs generation over a mesh with really smooth features difficult to make in the first place in cad, would be awesome to be able to convert a mesh to a nurbs that can later be used in a milling environment
Still not seeing how this can fly for anything past small maker 3D CAD stuff without proper NURBS support. Without it, you'll start running into topology issues that will propagate across your entire part as operations like booleans start destroying your mesh.
The recent live link between Plasticity and Blender might be what you are looking for. It's not actually released yet but it is in active development.
@@benveasey7474 I've seen a few plasticity videos and nobody demonstrates it being used for parametric modeling, master sketch modelling or similar, so I have no idea if this tool works for stuff which has to have constrained dimensions with measurements which might have to be adjusted later in the process without destroying the entire part.
*Shady man comes out from the shadows*
Hey mate, can I offer you some CAD tutorials?
hey omg, the tool still is not immediately obvious how to use it (what sketch plane, tools dont work right away, etc)
the tools need to be grayed out or disabled if they are not meant to be used, it must be simply k.i.s.s. mmkay?
fusion 360 does the sketching very simply, you go to totally different mode for sketching, and they are separate objects, why not add a top bar window mode selection instead of the mixed mode what?
you focus too much on being sponsored to do things properly, intuitive, simply working, instead of complex throw together no-through pile
@@Jkauppa Very dismissive comment, not useful. I am not affiliated with thisproject, but I have to say you obviously dont have a clue how large software is made. Intuitive and simply working is a long way ahead of many incremental improvements. This tool like many other authoring tools is built bottom-up, starting from enabling features and then adding on layers on top that simplify using them.
@@YaroslaffFedin your software add-on is not easy to use, so start eating your pride
Please can we have 2D technical drawings native to Blender...it would honestly be a game changer. The PRJ add-on and BlenderBIM can be tricky in this respect.
+1
If we could have OnShape for free, in Blender, that would be the end of many other applications out there. It would be a dream.
I thought about asking them about it, but I think they should stick with their core strengths. Their budget looks pretty tight. I made some sheet templates that I can append to any blend file and works good. The measurable addon can help with dimensions. Having a 2D workspace similar to grease pencil would be pretty nice though.
@@modelenginerding6996 The thing I struggle with using Measurable is if I need different sections in a large building. Making instances of the building for the different views isn't really practical.
I’m just so happy that CAD Sketcher is doing updates to make it more intuitive and an all around Great addition to Blender. I’m exited!
I've been using blender for 4+ years and recently I started needing more precision in my models, something only professional CADs could offer. It feels SO good that I don't need to switch to something like Fusion360 for this and can stay with the app I love! I'm really excited and looking forward to the add-on's development! 👏🏻
is there a simple SENSIBLE way to get documentation for cad Sketcher? every site seems to take me in circles. I'm impressed with your portrayal of Cad Sketcher and want to learn enough to use it if your group would make a straightforward way to get instruction and I'd be willing to pay for it As is I wont be led down the garden path by confusing and useless documentation sites. I'll take documentation free UNLESS ACTUAL DOCUMENTATION IS PROVIDED I realize that with ongoing changes documentation might work strangely or not at all) All I would like is a set of instructions for the current level.please note. This ranting concerns the usage instruction sites, absolutely not your fine video
Grats on the funding success! I hope to see v1 someday soon, but I honestly liked v0.1. ;)
Can sketches be used for parallel cross-sections of the same object (like for a ship drawing, for instance)?
Exciting stuff! Thank you for working so hard on it and keeping us updated!
This is so awesome! I've been nearly a year into leading an opensource project, developing an isomorphic (microtunable) laser cut & 3D printed synthesizer/MIDI keyboard. We couldn't have done it without you all!
Hey how can I check your keyboard out? Sounds cool
I'm really enjoying this addon, it actually has become my main CAD tool!! I have a question too, there is a way to wipe all the Cadsketcher information in a blend file? I did a duplicate to work in a variation of what I did but I can't remove all the entities completely. Great thanks!
i HAVE THE SAME ISSUE DELETING SKETCHES ..there are a ton of lines and points that refuse to be deleted. I get a standard python error.
Might be time for me to switch from FreeCad to CAD Sketcher? does it have topological naming bug like freecad?
I'm so excited! I was looking for something to use, instead of Fusion 360, in which I could make CAD based files 3D and sell them. This is so perfect. I'm usually making something for work where we repair computers but we're a small shop and I don't expect to have a large amount of income from the designs yet. I'm already working on learning blender so for it to do what I'm used to is a HUGE jump in functionality for me! Thank you guys so much for developing this! I'll try to donate some in the future.
I have little expectations for CADS, so anything is good news.
crashes ☹ just after activating (in Blender 3.4)
Wow that last feature is massive!