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Re:Gemini 3 for developers: New reasoning, agentic capabilities by ponyous on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @11:51AM (#45968789)
I started with a lighter weight solution (JSCAD) first and quickly hit the limitations. So I wanted to explore the other side of it - fully complex over the top software (blender).

I guess openscad would be a sweet spot in the middle. Good shout, might experiment.

Re:Gemini 3 for developers: New reasoning, agentic capabilities by adastra22 on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @12:03PM (#45968960)
Blender is not CAD. Edit: I’m not but picking. Totally different data structures and internal representations.
Re:Gemini 3 for developers: New reasoning, agentic capabilities by ponyous on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @12:07PM (#45969017)
Computer aided design. Tree.js can be CAD. But I agree it’s not meant for CAD even though you can do it.
Re:Gemini 3 for developers: New reasoning, agentic capabilities by adastra22 on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @12:46PM (#45969564)
Three.js is not CAD. It is an API for drawing 3D graphics in a browser. 3D graphics, in general, is not CAD. Blender is not CAD. You cannot do CAD operations in blender.

I'm not being nit picky here. I think there are issues beyond terminology that you may not be familiar with, as it is clearly not your field. That's ok.

The "design" in computer aided design is engineering design. This is not the same definition of "design" used in, say, graphic design. Something is not called CAD because it helps you create an image that looks like a product on a computer. It is CAD because it creates engineering design files (blueprints) that can be used for the physical manufacture of a device. This places very tight and important constraints on the methods used, and capabilities supported.

Blender is a sculpting program. Its job is to create geometry that can be fed into a rendering program to make pretty pictures. Parasolid is a CAD geometry kernel at the core of many CAD programs, which has the job of producing manufacturable blueprints. The operations supported map to physical manufacturing steps - milling, lathe, and drill operations. The modeling steps use constraints in order to make sure, e.g., that screw holes line up. Blender doesn't support any of that.

To an engineer, saying that an LLM gave you a blender script for a CAD operation is causing all sorts of alarm klaxons to go off.

Re:Gemini 3 for developers: New reasoning, agentic capabilities by ummonk on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @01:57PM (#45970424)
Next they'll be doing PCB CAD in Photoshop...
Re:Gemini 3 for developers: New reasoning, agentic capabilities by viraptor on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @12:52PM (#45969647)
> Blender doesn't support any of that.

... without plugins. https://www.cadsketcher.com/

Re:Gemini 3 for developers: New reasoning, agentic capabilities by adastra22 on Tuesday November 18, 2025 @01:03PM (#45969803)
The "-like" in CAD-like is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Re:Gemini 3 for developers: New reasoning, agentic capabilities by ponyous on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @04:45AM (#45977665)
Thanks for clarifying. I'm just getting into this field.

If Blender can export a .3mf file format and slicer gets it ready for 3D printing (gcode that actually instructs the printer head). Is the slicer actually CAD software?

And if you can export many formats that work with some manufacturing devices and you built a model in blender, did blender not help you with CAD?

Re:Gemini 3 for developers: New reasoning, agentic capabilities by lillecarl on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @09:05AM (#45979639)
Where does CAM? Fit into your view?

In high school CAD/CAM we used various CAD programs for designing (sculpting?) things and then imported them into CAM to generate g code programs, set tool constraints and such