Tools, Spaces, Robots and Widgets
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Blender Tutorials
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Blender Tutorials
Does anyone know of Guitar designing tutorials in Blender? If not would others be interested if I were to create some tutorials?
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23 Replies
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100%. Im about the only other person in the group that works with Blender and I think that’s a shame. Are you using any of the new CAD plugins or going stock ?
Btw, I have a tut in the archives about doing a boolean cut on a volume knob. I’d like to get your take on it if you have the time.
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Just watched the knob tutorial. I thought it was complete but very quick. Great if you know what the tools do but not really helpful in figuring out how the software works to do something different. I was thinking of using mostly stock blender but likely with the cad sketcher add on.
I should have added I have used Blender extensively… about 20 years ago, and I haven’t really used it since. That said I have used other cad programs lightly as well so familiar with modeling/cad in general. In short, if I am going to go through the trouble of relearning blender for cad type applications I might as well make it useful for a larger group as well. I also have some ideas on how to tie it in Nicoletti’s and Gores concepts (I am a software developer with a Physics degree) but that would be years down the road if ever. As it is I don’t have a ton of free time so going would be slow but you know about slow and steady.
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Man, I’d love to see someone put cad sketcher though its paces. Do you know James Roadman?
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I do not
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@ianhatesguitars what are some pros for blender that fusion can’t do?
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Well For starters Blender is free for commercial use and is far better guaranteed to continue to be than fusion ever will be so the investment in time is more worth while. Blender has been around for 29 years (started in January of 1995) has been free that entire time and is setup well to continue on. The rendering is vastly superior both as you are modeling and when you produce a final render. And in my personal experience Blender 20 years ago has far fewer bugs and hangups than fusion. When I tried Fusion it drove me bonkers how often the program got in the way and I would have to look for hours for a work around and/or redo the model. Finally I personally found that modeling tended to be slower in fusion than in blender once you got to know the shortcuts. Now both will get you where you want to go eventually but the hassle to get there is the difference. Now the one big down side of blender is that it was always initially intended to be a modeling app for CGI, video games(even has/had a game engine inside of it), computer generated graphics and not cad type applications. That said because of 3d printing and the availability of CNCs, laser cutters there has been a lot of work to get those features into blender in the form of add ones hence CAD Sketcher.
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Do you run hardops and boxcutter ?
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I haven’t. Add Ons wasn’t even a thing last time I really used Blender.
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Oh wow. Machine Tools is free and I highly recommend that as a starter. So much speed.
https://machin3.gumroad.com/l/MACHIN3toolsmachin3.gumroad.com
MACHIN3tools is a free, continuously evolving collection of blender tools and pie menus in a single customizable package.Discuss @ blenderartists.What's Deus Ex? It includes the Edge Constrained Transform tool, as well as Group Gizmos and the Punch It tool.The What's … Continue reading
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Does Blender have CAM?
To me that’s the thing that keeps me in Fusion, integrated CAM. If you’re running a CNC machine, and you frequently make changes, to be able to bounce back and forth from the modeling environment to the CAM has become absolutely essential to me. I’ll often times run a test of whatever I’m making and find some flaws, remodel it and then Fusion will update the CAM for me.
And on complex stuff the CAM can take quite a bit of time. Not as much as the model, usually, but a lot.
Even for simple stuff I’m doing this pretty constantly.
If I had to export a model from Fusion or another program to something that would write CAM, I would find that pretty miserable.
It’s different from 3D printing where you basically have one slicing operation and you’re good to go.
Maybe I’m missing something though.
There’s definitely frustrations about Fusion for me, and the learning curve was miserable, it really took me a year. Now I feel like I can more or less do what I want, sometimes with outside assistance.
I also went at it like running into a brick wall, the first big job I did was modeling a whole acoustic guitar and that was pretty dumb,
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I am not aware of any cam addins. That said some may exist that I am unaware of, I will keep an eye out for them
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no cam makes it a dead end for me. It’s not an issue if you’re 3d printing stuff but if you get to the cnc stage and you don’t have CAM I think you might find yourself screwed. Maybe Ian’s combined approach makes sense.
After 2 years at this, I’m considering paying for Fusion, I find subscription stuff irritating but my shop is basically based around it at this point. It’s cool that it’s been free but ultimately if I’m actually doing this then it becomes part of the cost of the business.
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I haven’t tried fusions CAM aspects but there are several other cam packages that will take models produced by any modeler and generate the gcode with it. In my experience they normally take dxf, stl or obj files. If I were ever to need to take something from blender to CNC that would be the least of my worries. That said that is typically a separate package all together and another $1000 from what I have seen. Though some have some basic modeler in them (vcarve I believe is like this or vise versa like fusion) I believe he no has an additional package you can buy for Cam things but I may be wrong on this. In short not having a Cam package isn’t a death sentence but I definitely get the lack of convenience not having on is particularly for non professional use
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yeah just to be clear the advantage of Fusion is that it’s all under one roof and it can continuously update your cam as your model changes. For me as a pretty ham handed modeler, as I’m prototyping something, if I make changes after making a prototype (I pretty much 100% always have to) I can go back to the modeling environment, make the changes and then Fusion can update the CAM to the changed model.
This isn’t really an issue with 3d printing as you’d just slice again, but for CNC, at least for me, working out the CAM is pretty time consuming and a lot of trial and error, so having it all under one roof is a huge deal.
I may be not understanding how some of these other cam programs work and this may be a bigger idea in my head but for me that’s a huge advantage with Fusion, but only if you are actually going to do real CNC. And probably just CNC on guitars, which I think it probably fairly complicated as far as CNC goes. Cam on a box is maybe nbd. A guitar neck gets pretty crazy.
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I’ve not used it but there is https://blendercam.com/ that’s out there. I’m a fan of Blender but haven’t used it. Incredible software all things considered.
blendercam.com
An Open Source solution for CAM with Blender 3D
An Open Source solution for CAM with Blender 3D
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Wow, that is quite the find. I hadn’t heard of that. Thank you !
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Welcome. It seems fairly robust for an open source project.
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Fusion really has endless bugs and dead ends where I find myself redoing my work or asking for help often. But over the last years of have gotten pretty decent with the program and used to the hassle. The modeling time is really a lot slower. Especially since I am trying to model so everything is parametric. After every sketch, I have to check parameters to make sure I constrained correctly. But I think that is an advantage. Because with the extra time, I have every neck I could ever need in the end.
Also having a time line to bounce around in is cool. And having CAM built in is too.
I would like to try blender tho. It’s Probly way more intuitive than fusion.
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My workflow is basically hopping in and out of Blender and Fusion. I usually rough thigs out dimensional in fusion, export the obj, and then finish shaping in Blender. There is nothing like the blender hot key environment for fast shaping as it is designed for production asset modeling in games, cg and vfx.
The other thing to think about is that while you model in nurbs in fusion, it spits out a mesh. Often times it does it really really rough. Since blender modeling for CG requires good modeling practices to reduce artifacts, if you model in blender, your mesh is just going to be cleaner and lighter than what Fusion spits out with it’s brute force algorithm (I’m assuming a little here).
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Blender, for me, was an absolute slog to learn. I was trying to tackle a larger project than just modeling, so there is that. It’s doable though and totally worth it, but intuitive it is not (imo). Things to note about my opinion on this is that I am old and up until blender I never used a hot key for anything. Blender is impossible without learning and making a muscle memory connection with about 50-100 hotkeys (depending on your goals).
One other upside to blender. If you make a clean model, the options for rendering become everything from crazy stylization to photo realistic. Also making killer promo videos etc.
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I will agree with Ian. When I first learned Blender it was a slog but being a poor college student I couldn’t afford 3ds max or Maya even the student versions. Intuitive it definitely WAS not. That said once learned the hot keys make it like nothing else. I did eventually get a hold of versions of 3ds max, Maya, sold works and AutoCAD but went back to blender mostly because I was faster with it and I knew I could maintain it. But life happened and I eventually had to drop modeling (I was primarily doing it for video games at the time). Then I got into CNC and 3d printing after several years and needed to model again I grabbed blender didn’t remember the hot keys so was slow and now that I needed more precise Cad it wasn’t a great fit. I found SketchUp and it fit my needs perfectly. It didn’t have an affordable gcode export so I wrote one 2.5d for the CNC. And found a tool path for the 3d printing. It worked well didn’t matter if I didn’t use it for a few months as it was simple to pick up. It had a couple large flaws (like with booleans) but free, easy and did the job. Then Trimble bought SketchUp from Google and SketchUp went down the tubes quick and I found I would have to relearn a far less capable system. So started looking around again and was pretty set on going with rhino after resigning to inkscape ( a 2d vector program) for design work. It was just the $1000 they wanted for it when I am going to use it what once or twice a year. I tried Fusion and found way to buggy and clunky for my sanity. Tried others too like tinker cad, scad and a few others. I saw blender again and the massive amount of work they had done with the interface so tried it again and fits leaps and bounds better than it was still not the most intuitive but more than capable and they now have this adding system which someone wrote a cad sketching program on to give blender parametric sketching capabilities. That didn’t seal the deal for me though as I remembered what a pain it was to initially learn. So I was just saving up for rhino. I had tried the demo and liked it. What made me decide to switch was one of the 3d club videos here where they tried the different packages and a comment was made that others agreed with that to use rhino properly you really needed to learn the hot keys. Well sh.. if I have to do that I might as well go with Blender. And if I am going to put in that effort again I might as well (see the top of this topic 😀)
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Not saying I’m a Fusion Fan but even in the 2 years I’ve been using it, it has improved in some significant ways. I have no idea what it was like 20 years ago. I wouldn’t necessarily describe it as buggy. There are some kind of annoying things I wish they would fix, mostly about navigating the environment. But it mostly works and is pretty powerful.
It also appears to be closer to an industry standard than Rhino (Tom might disagree) and there are a lot of resources for it, in particularly it seems to be somewhat commonly used in garden variety machine shops, so for CAM there’s a lot of stuff there.
Lately the more I use it the more it works. It has been pretty rough but now I’m starting to be able to maximize what I’m doing.
Part of the whole thing is basically teaching yourself to be a machinist, whether you know it or not. A lot of my issues with the whole process come from starting as a kind of shitty hand tool/router woodworker and then just landing into the machine world.
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I really glad to have access to both fusion and blender. I still don’t know of anyone who dual wields fusion and rhino, so I’ve never heard a real good comparison. My instinct is that better, although it sounds like Rhino 8 is adding a couple things that I cannot live without in both Blender and Fusion. Namely shrink wrap and push pull. Blender’s push pull really sucks right now btw. Making a hole through an object is super tedious in Blender.
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