Years ago I looked at, and sorta-learned, Blender for use as a tool for designing simple 3D printed objects. It wasn’t the best tool for that, and I switched to Fusion 360, which is awesome. But F360 isn’t actually free for hobbyists; you have to affirmatively renew your trial every year, which makes me nervous. Has Blender become better for this kind of thing?
Unfortunately no. Other options you might look at for GUI solid modeling are FreeCAD (the one I tried before giving up and learning Fusion) and Solvespace (you'll want to build 3.0 from source, the most recent release build is 2.3 from 2016).
Or for code based modeling, OpenSCAD is the big thing, and cadQuery is a newer python-based system that seems very promising. Version 2 of cadQuery is built on Open CASCADE, the same backend as FreeCAD, and I gather it makes some modeling operations like fillets and chamfers much more possible than what you can do in SCAD.
I've been meaning to dig into that but haven't made the time yet.
To answer your question, I think not significantly.
But I started 3D printing Feb this year and started 3D modelling only for that purpose. I don't see myself investing in anything else.
Right now it works ok for 3D printed models. Not great but if you are aware of it's faults you can work with it.
In future it'd take a single blip of that focused developer firehose to address a whole lot of concerns for us 3D printer types.
But even without a big business throwing money at them for that exact purpose, I am excited by boolean modifiers and the knife intersect tool getting significant updates in this release.
Right now Blender is so much more than a 3D printed object modelling tool. I like having the option to explore other fields in the 3D modelling space too.
> Right now Blender is so much more than a 3D printed object modelling tool. I like having the option to explore other fields in the 3D modelling space too.
True and funny as my primary Blender use is for video editing. I like having the option to explore other fields in the 3D modeling, animation, and VR space too.
If you want to design artwork, Blender is probably the right tool. If you want to design functional items in a similar manner to Fusion360, FreeCAD is probably the best FOSS solution, though it is not as good as Fusion360.
If you are looking for an alternative to Fusion 360, I can recommend OnShape. They also offer a free for makers style account where all your models are public and non-commercial. It is professional CAD and works great, parametric and all. It should be quite similar to Fusion. I use it for 3D printing.
Fusion 360 and Blender are fundamentally different tools. Stickign with Fusion is probably the best course of action if your goal is to 3D print a part.
