The future of product visualisation | 3D Rendering with Blender

[@bucklogos]

Nicole said you convert the cad models to OBJ and then import them into Blender. You may want to check out an addon called Stepper, which allows importing STEP files. It's really quite good, it retains custom mesh normals from the CAD model ensuring smooth shading, retains the CAD file structure, correctly instances parts that are reused multiple times, etc. Really helpful for working with CAD files in Blender.

[@adri.progression]

Ahh thank you for this tip, I usually export .obj 's from Autodesk Fusion then throw them into Blender-Octane edition for my projects.

[@tante4dante]

Does this work with every CAD software, like FreeCAD/Ondsel ?

[@DerekElliott]

Blender gonna take over the worrrllldddd

[@rizwanzaman1793]

Hi Derek!

[@salil808]

hasn't it already?

[@canon5059]

The OG Derek😂

[@Nickel3D]

As a mechanical engineer who also runs a product visualization business using primarily Blender, this video was AWESOME. Your team’s workflow outputs some amazing results, well done Nicole and others! 🙌🏼

[@Mix3Design]

Blender is coming to be Industry Standard , cool to see it doing all sort of stuff

[@nelsonn3042]

Great insight into product design and Blender, sounds like something I need to explore👏

[@elementengineering]

Thanks! Open source, great features, Blender is awesome.

[@CONTORART]

Aussie Aussie Aussie! With the CAD work it'd be worth giving Plasticity a go since it has a Blender Bridge so they work together great.

[@Benn25]

Blender is the most incredible soft in the world!

[@creativepm9437]

Nicole is basically me but in the company I am in. I come from an animation background so as we are developing a product, I come in with blender and do some of the workflows that were shown on here. I work with Rhino CAD and Blender. Its really nice to see someone utilizing the same workflows and displaying blender capabilities.

[@PabloVazquez]

So interesting and fun to watch. Thanks for putting this together! (and great work Nicole! 💪)

[@supertaurus2008]

This is all cool mate. Blender is an all in one package no doubt. But for you guys you should definitely look into adding plasticity to the pipeline.

[@ZKI_design]

Awesome! Thank you for sharing!!

[@mattsinlinnea]

Such a cool and interesting video!

[@justin7649]

Glad to see more companies getting into using Blender. I will say that it can be quite frustrating with the process that Autodesk now makes you go through to export models from their suite. They've slowly been phasing out the importing/exporting of universal 3D file formats from each piece of their software offerings (you can find the supported file lists documented on their website by each year). I understand that's to keep you within their eco-system (much like Apple), but overall I think it's hurting their business in the long-run. To attest to Blender's practical application; I have made precise models (turned products) for real-world manufacturing, solely using Blender.

[@michaelokere9467]

This looks really cool

[@adri.progression]

Great work Nicole and Ayrton! I also combine Autodesk Fusion with Blender-Octane for my work too. My friend was making an octopus, clipper boat, and ocean for his CNC class but was having trouble modeling ocean waves realistically in CAD. Because of my experience combining CAD and Blender and Adobe CC, I told him to run the water simulation in Blender then import it into Fusion to prep for CNC. I love the insights into your process and am keen on seeing what's next! If you haven't already, try out Blender-Octane which is a free version of Blender that includes Otoy's Octane rendering engine. I like it because I appreciate the way it handles metallic materials, lighting, and textures. Also, the quality per rendering time /resources is great because I'm doing it all on my gaming laptop as opposed to sending to a render farm / server rendering / big beefy workstation. I'm curious about what's next, especially for Simulation Nodes and as Blender evolves 🚀

[@Igoreshkin]

Blender is the future. Open source is the way.

[@kellymoses8566]

Music was TOO LOUD while people were talking, making it hard to understand them. I will never understand why people think music should be playing when people are talking.

[@elementengineering]

@@kellymoses8566 We’ll take that into consideration, thanks for your feedback!

[@esp4372]

My neck hurts just looking at how high your monitors are. Why are they so high?

[@elementengineering]

We'll be sure to discuss this at our neck-st staff meeting!