fast question
what does “AuotCAD” can do that blender cant ?
i am a blender user from 2011, and recently working with a group of students who are studding civil engineering , and wishing to use a 3d app to create architecture designs , interior and blueprint maps !
and i was thinking of introducing blender, but before i do i wish to know can blender does what does AutoCAD do or not ! and what’s the different it makes .
thank you for your time !
There are a lot of things AutoCAD can do that Blender can’t and vice versa. While AutoCAD can do 3d modeling, that isn’t its primary use. It is mainly used for CAD drafting. That is the production of drafted sheets for use in construction documents. So there are a lot of nifty tools for composing sheets, defining lineweights, adding text notation, etc. Lets say I draw an ellipse and I want to draw a line somewhere around it that lands tangent to the ellipse. You can approximate this in Blender, but that’s the point. AutoCAD gives you precise placement. Blender on the other hand is great at visual representation of 3d elements. The whole set of transform tools in Blender doesn’t exist in AutoCAD. While both programs can be used in many ways I think of creating marketing materials (i.e. visually stunning images) in Blender to sell you product, and AutoCAD is used to create the instructions for the manufacture of the product. For civil engineering, a CAD product will be better. For students, I would recommend they check out Rhino 3D, they can get an educational license for less than $200, create 3d models better than AutoCAD, be able to load and save AutoCAD files, and have 90 percent of the drafting and printing function of AutoCAD.
It has n-gons with holes, for one- CAD software handles polygons and 3D data in a completely different way than Blender and other DCC software. It’s not even comparing apples to oranges- it’s comparing apples to giraffes
It’s beyond that even, it only really polygonizes objects to show them to the user, all the geometry is calculated as CSG (constructed solid geometry).
A poly mesh is like a raster image, the detail is limited by the resolution. A CSG is more like a vector file, you can zoom infinitely and maintain full precision.
Most importantly for the OP: Autocad is one of those sticky “industry standards” If you want to be taken seriously in any real civil engineering project, you need to be using autocad (or one of its many vertical products)