This repository contains some utilities to make CAD modeling in Blender easier.

These utilities were mainly inspired by OpenSCAD. They make it possible to have a similar workflow to OpenSCAD, where you can define CAD models in code and automatically see the render update whenever you edit your code. However, your CAD models can now be written purely in Python, and using Blender's more powerful set of mesh operators and utilities.

bpycad/dev_main.py contains a main() helper function that makes it easy to run your CAD code to create objects in Blender, and automatically re-run it whenever your code changes.

To use it, pass in the function that generates your CAD objects, as well as a set of package or module names to monitor for changes. Whenever any change is detected on disk to the monitored packages, the existing Blender scene will be deleted and your CAD function will be re-run to re-generate the objects.

The bpycad/export_stl.py module contains a main() helper function that helps build a command line script to export STL files from your CAD models.

To use it, create your own script that wraps this function, and invokes it with a dictionary containing all of your model functions. bpycad.export_stl.main() will then parse the command line arguments to allow exporting STL files for all of your models, or just specific ones, depending on the command line arguments.

This repository also contains a few other utility libraries for doing mesh editing.

bpycad/cad.py contains functions for defining and manipulating 3D points/vectors/meshes. This code is generally independent from Blender, and is used to create meshes that you can manipulate on your own, and later turn into a Blender mesh object.

bpycad/blender_util.py contains functions for manipulating Blender mesh objects, plus some other utility functions for interacting with Blender.

In general the lower-level code in cad.py gives you a lot of flexibility to exactly define the vertices and faces you want. This makes it easy to programmatically place vertices, and create faces exactly connecting different parts of your model. The higher level blender_util.py module then makes it easier to manipulate your mesh with higher-level operators, like boolean intersection/union/difference operators, hull, bevel operators, subdivision, or other mesh clean-up operators.

Neither of these modules currently has a stable API, and they may be refactored in the future.

The example.py script contains an example of how to use this for CAD development. export_stl.py contains an example STL export script.

My mantyl repository contains some more complex real-world examples.