Generate engineering drawings (blueprints)

[faerietree]

I have coded an addon for generating engineering drawings. It takes very long though (over night) for even easier mechanical models (e.g. the waterwheel design).

Also adding dimensions automatically is buggy.

Once I get to it I will recode it in C and provide a pull request. I need to get more into the code first though.

(It was not published yet because it failed in review on blender store due to lack of proper documentation / video. In the meantime our financial situation at worlddevelopment is due to recover over the next year so we may well decide to put these plans aside. This is/was the only commercial code we wanted to provide. Wanted ... lol Time issues prevented it. Will put it onto the agenda for one of the next throngs (worlddevelopment club meeting.))

[mauge123]

Great, although we don't expect to get direct money incomings from "selling code".

Our idea about drawings was to get new space for it, and re-use the freestyle code for views. Addons imho should be used only for import/export and automatization processes.

[faerietree]

Of course not. Who is "we" in your case? Is there an organization behind mechanical blender? Or do you refer to our community?

Actually the blueprint addon uses Freestyle and is customizable (line stzles, included occluded lines, ...).

It allows generation of many views like Top, Front in one sheet. It is 2^x with x in natural numbers with 0. In combination with the selection to bill of materials addon it is quite powerful.

There is a lot room for optimization of both the quality of the result and the execution time though.

[mauge123]

Hi ;)

We referrers to TMaq (www.tmaq.es) , the company i work for, we had a student working on the project, but he was not continued after practices. So we could say that at this moment I'm the main contributor on the project. We will probably get another student during this [new] year, although the kind of development is not easy for not experienced people, so it steals time to me.

TMaq is a small manufacturing company located near Barcelona. As a small company it cannot afford a full time developer on it, and my contributions depends on other projects. We are currently working on 2D and we should jump to 3D, and would be great to do it in Blender.

We are using Debian on computers and [customized] opensource applications.

[faerietree]

Great! So you have something ahead of organizations (companies, universities) I've tried to convince of a full Linux workflow hopelessly.

So I have begun to focus on the positive and our worlddevelopment club is based on Ubuntu and Void Linux which I'd like to recommend to you if you don't mind! It is a very simplistic and fascinating Linux flavor|distribution. :)

Thank you for your work done so far and that your plans work out nicely. Let's make this world prosper in peace and be(come) happy. Despite my location in the unfortunately often labelled 'dictator' Germany I often think about Spain and have my fingers crossed that our Spanish friends do recover! Before you starve let me know and I'll try my best to help you out.

[gree303]

Any intentions bringing it to Blender 3.x or maybe as addon possible?

[mauge123]

did some stuff out of github related to addon development, but get out of time / resources.

thanks for you interest.

[faerietree]

Same for me. Backlog too big. :D