Blender right software for engineering?

Hey folks, i have registrated to this forum because of a certain problem. I’m an ongoing engineer for pipe welding and pipe beveling machines. During my study time i’ve worked with CAD and now i’m looking for a more specific program for pipe welding and beveling machine engineering. Is Blender the right one? Here you can see examples of the machines i’m talking about - so that you can imagine my needs a little bit. Thanks and greets from germany, Benni :slight_smile:

Short answer: no

Long answer: no, blender doesn’t output CSG-based geometry at all (e.g. STEP files) or support much in the way of parametric modeling, either. The conversion between mesh models and solid models is difficult and fraught with problems. Generally engineering tasks require solid models, not mesh models.

Basically blender is made to create art, not do engineering. It has some features that are kinda useful for engineering… if you can use mesh models. But it’s not built for this task at all.

And I think it goes without saying that while blender has a bevel tool, it has no features designed specifically for pipe beveling machine engineering. (???)

What software are you using now and what’s wrong with it?

If you want to do animations or renders of assemblies, it could be a good companion app for a cad program. And it might be decent for quick prototypes of moving parts. But for actual down and dirty engineering, not really ideal.

If you are looking for free solution, I would suggest looking at FreeCad. It is opensource parametric solid CAD modeller. Something can be done in it, but don’t expect production ready package (like SolidWorks or similar) - it is currently at version 0.14.
Nice to see somebody developing “Bevel Modifier” as a physical device :slight_smile:

Even in mesh modeling Blender seriously doesn’t have any precision.

Have you looked at freecad? EDIT oops… mentioned already.

http://www.freecadweb.org/