What is CADence
An addon that tries to combine CAD-style sketching with standard polygon modeling in Blender. Not a Fusion 360 replacement — more like borrowing the sketch-based workflow and bringing it into a Blender pipeline. The goal is to make it a natural tool for hard surface modelers, not a separate CAD environment you have to context-switch into.
How it works
You draw a 2D sketch on a mesh face or on a virtual plane, then extrude it as a boolean operation directly onto your model. Live drag shows you the result in real time as you move the mouse.
- Drawing tools: Line, Rectangle, Circle, Arc, Polygon, Ellipse, Slot, Spline
- Modify tools: Trim, Move, Mirror, Offset, Fillet, Chamfer, Blend Curve, Slice, Project
- Constraints: Coincident, Parallel, Perpendicular, Tangent, Equal Length, Equal Radius, Concentric, Symmetry, Angle, Dimension — and more
- Snapping: Endpoints, midpoints, intersections, perpendiculars, parallels, extensions, projections, grid
- Extrude boolean modes: Difference, Union, Intersect, Slice, New Object
There’s also a Section View tool that cuts the object at the sketch plane so you can see inside while you work.
Mesh cleanup
Booleans make a mess. There are three cleanup modes built into the addon — from a light dissolve-and-merge pass to an aggressive deep clean that handles coplanar faces, interior geometry, non-manifold edges, and converts tris to quads. Still being refined but already useful.
Limitations
Coplanar booleans are the main pain point. Artifacts on coincident faces are still a thing. With some workflow discipline you can avoid most of them, and the cleanup system helps, but it’s not magic.
This is a work in progress. There’s more in the addon than what’s shown in the video, and some parts are still rough. I’ll keep posting updates here as things move forward.
Questions, feedback, criticism — all welcome.