CAD Sketcher

The Project
At the core of it, all CAD Sketcher believes in facilitating precision modeling within blender. We are not looking to replace CAD programs. We just want to bring CAD-like functionality to the world of mesh modeling.

This all begins with CAD Sketcher, which we hope will be the cornerstone for many other CAD-like functionalities and addons to come to the world of blender.

CAD Sketcher is a constraint-based sketcher addon first developed by hlorus for Blender that allows you to create precise 2d shapes by defining CAD geometric constraints like tangents, dimension, angles, equal and more. These Sketches are then converted into beziers or mesh which stay editable through a fully non-destructive workflow i.e, Geometry nodes and modifiers.

It is still very early days for CAD Sketcher and we are looking to nail down the basics first, for release 1.0.0. This includes a robust core toolset for sketching with a comfortable sketching workflow and a bug-free experience.

In the future, we are looking to take things out from the 2D space and into the 3rd dimension by adding features like sketch to sketch referencing, mesh face parametric referencing, 3-dimensional constraints and perhaps take things even a step further by exploring assemblies and if anything can be further improved with the NURBS workflow in blender.

The truth of it all
We are big advocates of FOSS (Free Open Source Software) but we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that merging the functionality of CAD with the world of mesh modeling is going to be an easy and a free challenge to take on. Thus we need your support both, coding contributors and monetarily, think of CAD Sketcher as the "Blender Development Fund" but for the CAD/precision arm of blender.

We plan to use your support to both incentivise and pay for the tricky development and running costs of CAD Sketcher. By using Open collective you will be able to see where every penny goes.

Lastly, beyond the core creation of CAD Sketcher our long-term plan is to then use the CAD Sketcher Development Fund to further help and support other CAD-like precision orientated addons for blender, this could be everything from CAM integration to laser cutting functionalities or .step file support to NERBS based developments. 

Ultimately, together as a community, we will be making these decisions to create the tools and workflows that we wish we always had.