I’m working on a dimensioning capability, in the CAD sense, for Blender, starting from the Blender Caliper plugin. I’ve already fixed most of the bugs in Blender Caliper and am going on from there. As part of this, I want to store some data with the scene.
Blender doesn’t currently store the dimensions of a “Blender unit”, a common piece of data needed for various purposes such as import/export, physics, and dimensioning. This is a good candidate for the ID Property system.
That seems like a very good concept, but instead of integrating dimensions into Blender, they seem to have added a “Sketch” object that is 2D-CAD like.
The project information at https://projects.blender.org/projects/mechanicblender is all empty. Zero files. Nothing in SVN. No documents. Activity level 0%. There’s a video of a demo, but it’s not clear what’s being demoed.
Personally I’d like to see a CAD mode in Blender (including modelling nodes like in Rhino), but I don’t think adding a lot of CAD tools to Blender is generally a good idea – Blender is a lot more than CAD.
There are many people that would love to see a CAD-side of Blender, and me too. there will be a lot of people that say CAD is not what Blender was intended to be - and that is true too. One idea I had was to have the CAD features to be “dormant” in Blender, some sort of Grease Pencil that you turn on and off as needed. I also asked/suggested to have something like QCAD doing this CAD drafting/dimensioning. There is the code from QCAD (community edition) available, that in my opinion can be used nicely to complement Blender’s CAD side. a