CAD In Blender Is HERE! | CAD Sketcher Intro | Constraint Driven Design

[Music] as you've just seen a brand new precision modeling workflow has just been born with cad sketcher a free and open source constraint based parametric system within blender that's letting you do cad like design like never before now it's still very early days and there's lots of development and features still to come but i've been working very closely with loris the lead developer of cad sketcher to get this past the point of proof of concept and now it's time for us the community to bring this precision workflow to life so i'm here to show you how to get it and install it how to get started with it and how you can help cad sketcher go further to get cad sketcher go down into the description where there'll be a link to this official gumroad page here there's a whole bunch of useful information it is completely for free but if you want to support the project put in an amount here that you would like if not just put in a zero and click i want this this will then give you a zip file which we'll go and install over in blender now to install cad sketcher it's pretty much the same as every other add-on go over to edit preferences add-ons and then go over to install find wherever the zip file is actually saved and then install that add-on then you can put in the search here type in card you'll find card sketcher right there and the first thing you need to do is install a solver module all you have to really do is click this install from pip click that you've got to wait a couple of moments if things go wrong you'll get a warning message down here that's going to let you know that you might just need to restart blender so with that done let's go double check that preferences add-ons here it is it's installed perfectly for me as i'm using a 4k screen and all of that i'm going to change here my entity size up to 3 my text size to 45 i'm also going to change my decimal precision to 1 my angle precision to 1 as well and on my theme here i like to have my default color right here i put this all the way up to a nice blue so let me just show you i click here bring that all the way up there i'm happy with how that is brilliant i'll save it just in case and there we have it now as the name suggests we need a sketching surface to do that let's press n to open up our side menu and you'll see we have a new drop down called sketcher let's click this and let's add a sketch by clicking add sketch it then brings up all these construction axis planes that's asking you where would you like to start this sketch select a plane that you would like to sketch on so i'm going to go from the top down i'll click this and i'm now inside of that sketch i'm going to move my 3d cursor for a moment so that is shift and right click to move it out the way and there's also this little point right here as you can see this just lets us know that this is a solve point a 2d solve point and we are inside of a sketch because here there's this big leaf sketch now there's a lot to cover here when it comes to constraint driven design and all the rest but for now i'm just sort of going to do a very quick overview by just creating a cube so i've clicked the rectangle tool here i'm going to left click drag this out left click once again automatically it is put these horizontal and vertical constraints on here the 3d view still works just as normal but what i'm wanting to do is sort of put this to the center of it so i'm going to click on the line button here there are a whole bunch of shortcuts that you can see there it says invoke shortcut l i'm not going to use shortcuts in this video for the time being i'm going to click one point and click to the other point i'm going to right click to cancel the tool that i'm on and you'll see that that brings it back to that selection there i'm going to right click on this line and turn that into a construction line now i'm going to select the origin point and the construction line and i'm going to give this a midpoint constraint and there we have a nice little midpoint constraint so now we know that that's going to be set in the middle i think it's time to give this some dimensions and some equals so i'm going to go this nice point from point here the distance between those two is going to be set let's click into here i'm going to click into there and i'm typing 5 millimeters i'm happy with that you can click on any of these and drag them down if you want to delete just click and you'll see that there's the delete constraint right there you can also delete these constraints by just clicking on them and now to keep life simple i'm going to select these two edges here and make them equal now that those are equal this is a fully constrained sketch because i cannot move anything anywhere so now that we have our first fully constrained sketch how do we turn this into mesh well right here we have the lovely converting options you can convert this either into mesh or you can convert it into a bezier so i'm going to go for mesh for now i'm happy with that i'm going to click leave sketch and here we have our lovely face that is being driven by that sketch so i'm going to press w for my selection select this face i'm going to add a modifier here which is going to be a solidify modifier brilliant and i'm going to put this in the positive and i'm going to make this four millimeters there we have our first sort of object now that we have this i've decided that i want to change the size of this how do i change that i go over to the sketch here i click on the little pen to edit it and now i'm back into that sketch i can just click here change this to i don't know let's go for two millimeters hit enter that's done that i leave the sketch everything's been updated as you can see this is incredibly powerful okay now you might be wondering okay you've just shown me how to create the work plane and that is very limiting it's very much just based on the origin it is and remember that this is very much still in development but there is one other way of doing this that i want to show you i'm going to add a bevel modifier here i'm going to crank this up quite a bit to about there okay now we have a lovely face right here that i would love to put a hole that just goes through this how would i go about doing that well here we have add a work plane if you click and let it hold down you'll see that there's two different ones one of them the default one is a mesh face and the other one is manually so i'm going to go for mesh face and you've got this i'm just going to left-click and that's created a work plane right there now that this has created an entity of a work plane there i'm going to go back into my normal selection i'm going to click add sketch and now i have this work plane here to be able to reference off so i'll click into there i'm now in that work plane there i can select this circle i'm going to click there go out this way and let's just do a nice little click to there let's set this the size of the circle to 0.5 might be a little bit too big yeah let's go for a 0.25 there we go i'm happy with that so now that we've got that there oh i've got a right click to cancel the operation and right click again to go to normal selection i'm going to leave that as it is not constrained at all so i'm going to leave the sketch at this point but i've got to make sure that i change my conversion type to mesh so then when i leave it turns into mesh now with that done i can select that mesh that i've created right there i can solidify it as well let's go and put this to 0.5 let's bring this up like that and the reason why i've got that at 0.5 actually i should probably just send that to 1 0 i mean is because there can be rounding errors if i set this to just minus one let me show you just quickly how that could be so with this one now selected i'll select this one over here i'll go control minus and here there's a little bit of a rounding error this is something remember we are in development we need your help and other contributors so just going to do the offset a little bit off like that and it will be just as precise as always so there it is this is cad sketcher in a nutshell there's so much more to go into this but for the time being i'm just going to show you how to do a couple of the other constraints around about place so i'll go back into our original sketch here with our cube and i'm just going to move over to here to just show you a couple of things so let's go into a line creation let's create two lines here so right click then i'll create another line like this brilliant and i would like to create a curve that's going to be tangent across these lines well i'm just going to click the point curve there click one of these and then click to the other one this has now joined up these points the reason why i'm saying this is because right this minute this is not supported we cannot go like this and then select these two points and try and do a coincident coincidences are currently not supported they will be supported definitely in the future but for the time being we haven't sorted out the auto merge so just be aware of that so make sure that when you're making some of the things here you just have to make sure that you make them correctly as you see when things are selected they show up here as entities and if you're wanting to make this tangent we'll select both of these here and then we're just going to create a tangent constraint and this is now tangently connected now there's 101 more things that i can show you about cat sketcher and all of that is coming i promise i'm going to be doing an entire free course here on youtube just like i did for precision modeling and blender and in time being we need you to help get cad sketcher out there share this video share this information with other makers and let them know that this is happening inside of blender join the cad sketcher community and for you you developers please consider contributing to the project the links are down in the description please please please we would love to turn this into something amazing for everyone so with that all said i'd love it if you joined the maker tales discord as well as i'm going to have a card sketcher channel specifically in there as well and a big thank you to my patrons you guys are absolutely awesome and without you i would have not been able to get so involved with card sketcher and truly help make this add-on a real reality with that said a big thank you to my vip makers jem oscarnak and david fernandez it really means a lot and if you're enjoying what i'm making here and you think i'm worthy of your support i would love to see you there too as i just said remember that we have a discord and i'd love to see you there thank you for watching keep making and let the quest continue

Channel: Maker Tales

Views: 351,994

Keywords: blender, blender tool tutorial, blender cad, blender construction lines, blender add on, blender cad add on, blender construction lines add on, blender cad construction lines, CAD Sketcher, addon, blender 3.1, 3.0+, blender cad add-on, blender line tool, blender arc tool, blender rectangle tool, blender circle tool, blender cad tools, SketchUp, Fusion 360, freecad, Free, Opensource, tangents, distances, angles, equal, parallel, Constraint, driven, design, CAD, precision, 3d print, sketch

Id: 92QmjS-xDaI

Length: 11min 22sec (682 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2022