qmoto0

I've been impressed by this as well (not just in the blender project). I think having a good leader who can maintain a clear architecture for the project has a huge impact on the consistency of the result. It can be expressed as something like coding style or source tree layout, but also affect which features make it in, and how they affect a user's workflow.

I don't know how they manage it, exactly, but it contrasts quite a bit with other projects I've seen that feel more haphazard, get-any-feature-in-and-we'll-polish-it-up-later. With blender, things feel polished long before we see them in the release.

I have used blender for some 3d printing projects. Shapeways has several articles describing the process and highlighting some of the issues (eg https://www.shapeways.com/tutorials/prepping_blender_files_f...).

However, while I think it's very good for animation/rendering purposes, it is missing a lot of things you might expect in a full CAD app. I use it to build meshes and then describe how to deform it. It has some procedural constraints. I recall it has some snapping behavior, and googling around shows some plugins that try to add some of this missing CAD functionality, but I can't really judge their success.

Maybe see also - https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/53293/is-blender...