Can you use CAD models in Blender? (Tutorial)

hey guys in this video I want to talk about whether or not we can use CAD models inside a blender and kind of some of the benefits of doing so the short answer is yes you can of course you can all you have to do is export the model as an fbx file and import that into blender but I want to show you a bit more of the Practical side of this type of thing and how powerful a cad can actually be so the software I'm using here is called Moy 3D there's a bunch of other CAD software you know you have SolidWorks Fusion 360. there's a ton of others out there I just think Moy is um very easy to use you can learn this in like a day although I think the workflow is quite inefficient compared to blender anyways what I'm going to do is just maybe add in the sphere and I'm going to cut a hole in the sphere so I'm just going to add in a circle and we're going to cut here on the surface just go into extrude this in and then I'm just going to run a different Spool in like that then what we can do is maybe run some fillets just basically um multi-segment bevels like that and now we have a really simple shape now this is kind of one of the benefits of using a CAD software is because you don't have to deal with any sort of shading or topology issues like you would have in blender so for example if I had a sphere here inside a blender and I try to do the same thing you would basically get the same type of result but if I tried to Bevel this we're going to get some nasty shading artifacts because what happens is it overlaps the topology around here so like you've seen in my other videos the solution for that would be to use something like mesh machine and then just run an offset cut and you basically have um have a fix there we can bevel the inside here as well but the nice thing about using you know CAD is CAD doesn't work with topology it works with mathematical equations it's Vector based essentially so it's very precise for one and two shading and shading artifacts can't really exist because there's no topology to really cause it and this is one of the better sides of um you know using CAD is you can kind of bypass these random types of problems on a blender now I've said before I still can get pretty much identical results to CAD inside of blender I have plenty of videos showing mesh machine and how to use that basically gives you a cad workflow inside of blender but if you want truly accurate precision and you also want really clean shading that is what CAD is going to give you so let's say I exported this into blender and I don't know how it works in other CAD software but I assume you just export it as an fbx file so I'm going to go here to file and then export and I'll just over old one and let's see we'll just kind of um you can play with the size here so if you want like a low poly option you can do that if you want a high poly option you can do that and also you have different outputs here you have like quads and triangles so any areas with end gobs would be triangulated and all the quads remain the same you also have an option to completely triangulate the whole mesh which could be useful if you wanted to bring this like directly into some I don't know some other software that needed it but I almost always use n-gons here because it's going to give you the same result that blender would give you but with clean shading so just go ahead and click on the OK button it's going to export and then you just go here to blender and you import that fbx file it's really easy we'll just go in here to sphere scale this up let's kind of move this over and let's rotate this just more or less in the same position hole's a little bit bigger but you know same idea and basically what we're going to have here is we're going to have you know a um a sphere but the shading is going to be clean now the reason it kind of looks a bit you can kind of see these squares here is because I did make the resolution a little bit low on the export so to fix that you know I could always make this a little bit higher perhaps then I wouldn't really get that problem let's try importing this again yeah there we go so now it's clean so if it's too low poly you might get those weird problems but I usually just make it higher poly so in this case you know these spheres look almost identical you know the density is more or less the same the cuts more or less the same but if we go into matte cap you're going to see a very clear difference in terms of the shading so here inside a blender um you know you can see some pretty obvious shading issues around here they're more pronounced here in this matte cap you can kind of see it a little bit Jagged around there but in here the shading is actually completely Flawless because this was created with a mathematical Precision inside of a inside of Moy so there's a bunch of different solutions to get the clean shading here inside of blender without having to go through the hassle of you know going into CAD exporting it you know that whole ordeal so I have plenty of those Solutions in our topology handbook 2.0 course which is a free course we just updated it recently Shameless plug there but it's free so can't complain but basically as a summary there's a bunch of different solutions you could use to get the clean shading and blender you could use normal transfer you could use something like quadri measure so you could actually remesh this thing we'll just make it just go a bit high on the poly column but you could actually remesh it here inside a blender and that will clean up the shading because now the topology is clean see what I mean I mean you could do other things like just make the model really really dense to the point where the shading isn't really the shading issues aren't very pronounced so a bunch of different solutions I don't want to go through all those in this video because I just literally made a free course on that for that reason but what I really wanted to show you here is that you guys can get really clean results using CAD so if you ever run into a situation where it's going to help you to just make something in there and then export it to blender this is basically how you do it and it's going to give you the same results as blender minus the shading problems basically and that's just the nature of polygons guys when you're working with polygons you're going to run into issues with shading and potentially artifacts from time to time if you're um you know using booleans it's just the name of the game it just kind of depends you know what is the juice worth the squeeze which one is um better for you and your workflow and for me I find blender to be way more efficient obviously blender's free and the paid add-ons that I use are like less than 100 bucks total compared to CAD which can be like several hundred or several thousand so to me I can get all the results that CAD has and basically the same amount of time using my workflow but I definitely wanted to show you the solution because this is something that a lot of people don't consider and if you're a cad user by career or whatever you can always use those models in blender to render it or whatever you might need to do so pretty cool stuff um if you ever want to just make something inside of Cad and bring it in here you could always use Cycles to render it as well which is you know to me which is pretty cool that means you wouldn't have to buy like a um an external rendering engine like key shot or something so you guys have so many different solutions when it comes to hard surface modeling and that's really what I try to show you in this video I try to show you blender but there are other ways to get some pretty clean results so that's it for this video hope I gave you some ideas and like I said I'll link that topology handbook in the description if you want to pick that up anyways hope you enjoyed and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Josh Gambrell

Views: 20,234

Keywords: blender tutorial, can you use cad models in blender, blender hard surface modeling tutorial, blender hard surface, hard surface modeling blender, hard surface, blender 3d, blender 3d modeling, cad, moi3d tutorial, moi3d, blender cad, blender hard surface modeling, hard ops tutorial, boxcutter tutorial, mesh machine tutorial, mesh machine blender, blender mesh machine, josh gambrell, ponte ryuurui, blender bros, masterxeon1001, chipp walters, blender

Id: Hpt6tTXOSRc

Length: 7min 28sec (448 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2022