Question for those conversant in blender: I'm pretty good with parametric CAD (solidworks and fusion) but have never touched Blender. I've been curious about Blender but I have no artistic or sculptural skills. I use 3D cad for both 3d printed objects and machining.
Is Blender worth learning for somebody who probably couldn't make a snake out of playdoh?
Blender doesn't use the nice boundary representations that you might be familiar with from Fusion 360 or Solidworks. Everything in Blender is "bag of triangles/quads," so it's lower level than what you may be used to. Getting good CAD-like results requires keeping this in mind. There are addons that are starting to address this. SolverSpace has a blender addon, for example.
What do you want to build? If you're not making CAD parts, the story is much different for artistic / game engine / character or environment design. I strongly recommend checking out Blender and noodling around.
If you're intimidated, the only cost is time, which is offset by the pleasure of learning something new. Here's a particularly good starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzHvD9RFrT8
As someone who was in the same boat for a long time, I only clicked with Blender once I had a real need for it: In my case, creating an ad-style video for a product I’d created in Fusion.
I’m not sure there is any point trying to do what you can in parametric software in Blender. Despite both being capable of a range of 3D tasks, they have remarkably little in common.
It depends on what your best hopes for yourself are.
You don’t need a lot of creative skill to model something geometric such as furniture or mechanisms. Having modeled it you would need to texture, light and render it. That can required good visual judgement, but god knows there are lots of examples to learn from.
Making organic forms is another matter and would require some sculpting skills, which are not easy to acquire.
Finally, there is the procedural environment of geometry nodes. With a good mind for maths, you could make some super cool abstract animations.
I learned blender purely to edit borked meshes customers brought in when I worked at a 3d print service bureau that refused to spend money on software.
Now I can just about fix, edit, or make anything I want in blender pretty quickly and have even started making some 3d art. Definitely worth putting the time in
I was a similar path, learned and used Autocad from kid onwards. Being able to visualize things in a top/front/side view is a huge help in modelling. And you can get pretty far in making nice things with just a simple extrude/scale workflow in Blender.
As for being worth it. depends on your goals tbh. For 3d printing/cnc, I'd still stick with cad. Blender can do it, but it's not nearly as good as any cad software. If you're looking to expand into editing videos or making models for something 3d the spatial sense will make life easier in learning Blender for sure.
Personally, I'd say yes. I started out with Merlin 3D and Autocad way back in the day, and of course, Blender is a whole other beast. Took me some time to get used to it, but once I did, I found 3D made a lot more sense than it ever had in those other applications.
Of course, YMMV, but I'd say you should give it a shot. Even just poking around is a start.
Blenders CAD like features is so small. The thing is that 3d Art is just a totally different skill.
CAD is a drafting board: sharp pencils, precise rulers, curve templates.
Blender is in contrast: a giant set of acrylic paints. It just does different things entirely.
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Here is something you can do today. Open up Blender, left click on the default cube. Menu->Object->Quick Effects->Quick Smoke.
Hey look, you turned something into a Physics simulation of (artistic) gas rising. Now play with settings till you are bored and/or your CPU got too hot and your room is too warm. These buttons use a ton of CPU time lol.
Hit spacebar to play the simulation.
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This is Blender. It's animation, it's art, it's imprecise. It's full of random widgets that deeply simulate colors or simple physics or do basic effects.
The only downside is that this doesn't produce a scene that always you render it. You just get to watch it in the composition window. Rendering it is just a static opaque box.
My fault for choosing a harder to work with simulation.
Gas simulations result in volumetric data which EEVEE, the default rasterization engine, is unable to display.
You need to turn the gas / volumetric data into something else first before EEVEE can work with it.
Alternatively, you switch to the Raytracer 'Cycles' and THAT can directly display volumes.
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Sorry. Maybe I should have picked an easier simulation to work with lol. But the overall effect is the same: Blendernis a massive collection of tools of tools, and knowing how to plug them into each other is exceptionally different than CAD.
The 3D modeling part isn't very much of Blender at all. I stand by my main point. You'll be spending huge amounts of time learning all this other stuff that a CAD engineer doesn't even know he doesn't know about.
Is Blender worth learning for somebody who probably couldn't make a snake out of playdoh?