Blender 3.0 Or FreeCAD For 3D Printing | Which Should You Learn?

so should you learn blender or freecad for 3d printing put frankly i really believe that 98 of you should just go and learn blender but i understand that this question has so much more behind it but frankly it's about how we like to think about the 3d space for some of us we have to see the world through units constraints to truly be able to see that 3d thing in the 3d space and be able to understand it properly now if you really don't need more than five decimal places of precision i truly truly encourage

you to just try and learn blender it really can do five decimal places of precision and it's so incredibly flexible and you can do so much in it but for those of you that are looking to do sort of parametric modeling for work especially mechanical engineering product design for massive manufacturing as well as architecture and you have more than five decimal places of precision and maybe for some of you that are dealing with a cnc every day even though there are cnc add-ons coming really quickly for blender then you guys should really go parametric and

forget about mesh modeling altogether but just be aware that inside of blender you can do hard surface and organic modeling really quickly and easily without having to deal with the numbers of it you get to work with photogrammetry very quickly and easily you can do faux parametric models again quickly and easily and you're going to be able to do full parametric models using blenders no geometry node system which some would even argue you already can but i would say you still need about a year until that is fully fleshed out but most importantly especially for

3d printing is you get to play around with stls and 3mf's really easily inside a blender you can do whatever it is that you want to do with it be a small edit or complete change you can do that inside of blender now don't get me wrong you can do that inside of a parametric program but it's a bit like hammering in a screw in the sense that it will do it but it's definitely not made for that so as you can see i am definitely a little bit more biased to blender now that's got

nothing to do that i have a free course a paid course and two years of content it truly is because i've been both on the parametric side and on the organic modeling side and then when i found blender and i was able to merge those two worlds into one my mind was blown and i truly believe that the maker community don't really give blender that chance sometimes because they just see oh that is just for organic modelling that's it and that's why i've made maker tales so blender focused so that i can really open up

that door to as many people as possible now i think the best way to go forward from here is i'm just going to go to the top most popular sites out there look at the most popular files on the stls the 3mf's and i'll just point out which are literally impossible in blender and which would be a pain in blender and see what happens starting it all off with the og of thingiverse so let's take a look at the front page right here benchy feel like i could completely make this this one can be done

especially now that i've got my gear right on totally now this one here the sundial the sundial will basically be almost impossible in blender just due to just the mathematics behind it it can be done you could probably make a python script to make it but i would just say that this is probably a parametric model for sure then going down here is there anything that truly stands out that just would not be possible in blender i'll go for one more page why not let's see there's nothing just no everything here is 100 possible to

do in blender now let's go over to my mini factory now my main factory of course doesn't quite represent it as well because it's a lot of organic modeling in here and this here yeah all of this is pretty much telling me it would be blender let me just check that one i'll see how that one's built up but all of this would definitely be possible in blender let's check that file there that card stacking one yep definitely possible in blender so let's go on to thanks so we're here and thanks let's see if there's

anything here anything that's popping out to me is saying it could not be done in blender i don't think so let me see i'll just carry on for a little bit more this might be a little bit of pain but it is definitely possible i'm sure that was a pain to do in a CAD program as well this i would say a little bit because nurbs and curved surfaces inside a blender precision modeling and curves right this minute uh it's one of the things that sort of still needs to be loved in blender but it's

definitely getting there okay no there's nothing here that i feel cannot be done in blender maybe this one let's take a look um let's look at the design properly let's see if there's anything here that seems ridiculous no that is yeah i could definitely do that in blender pretty quickly actually um so let's go on to the next one with the prusa prince and let's see here um i would say a little bit this but it's a tricky thing there's there's a difference between can you design it and how many prototypes did they do before

they got to the final design so yes it's definitely possible in blender and i'm sure they did plenty of prototypes to get that end result anything else that's very quickly here i'll just carry on going down probably this a little bit just because of the way that the teeth are arranged there now you can definitely do that for sure actually no i would say it's actually quite easy now that i'm thinking it through it actually wouldn't be too hard this here the holder no possible completely possible there is nothing uh why am i finding this

so hard even the cryptex cryptex are fundamentally quite simple once you understand how what exactly and how they work so let's see anything anything come on okay you know what let me find a site that i know for sure there's going to be something that cannot be done in blender so here we go going to the complete other end of the spectrum which is a CAD so in grab card surely there's plenty here that can't be done in blender so for instance this here injection molding machine i most definitely would not want to do something

like this in blender i'm not saying it can't be done but do not put yourself through that if you want to design this go for a parametric program if not you're going to really struggle when you need to do a change now as we go down here we go an engine i gather if you're going to be doing this type of precision you go with a parametric program i would not suggest doing that in blender at all let's see what next can we get here so as i look through these i'm seeing that most of

them are dealing with something for work now like i just said if you need precision for work don't even look at mesh modeling but just be careful whenever you go for these CAD programs especially for the paid ones if you go for their sort of maker license a lot of them have brought down from 100k to that you can only make 1k a year so a big big heads up there um but by all means i really do think you could make most of this stuff in free CAD or openscad on all of those just

there is a hell of a learning curve for it and be prepared for that so as you've just seen i almost struggled to find things that i couldn't do in blender now that doesn't mean that blender can do it all it means that i just feel technically adept enough with blender that i could pull it off so if you're looking to learn blender i have a completely free precision driven course here on youtube it's 10 hours long very technically in depth but you make one tiny model in the middle of it so if you're wanting

to jump straight to the good bits and also learn 3d print design and blender while creating 3d printable projects head on over to maker tails academy where you can learn everything you need for blender for 3d printing all the links for everything i just mentioned are going to be down in the description and a huge thank you to my patrons you guys mean the world to me and i would not have been able to make maker tales without your support and if you're enjoying what i'm making here you think i'm worthy of your support i

would love to see you there too and don't forget that we have a discord which is linked down in the description as well thank you for watching keep making and let the quest continue