I finally got my 3D printer working properly which meant it was finally time to learn some "real" software to do the 3D design instead of fiddling with SketchUp trying to get surface based modeling to create properly manifolded and printable items. I need to do boolean operations to 3D meshes on a linux desktop so I figured I'd try Blender.

Learning blender was slow going. It took me about a week before I could feel confident in being able to make the shapes I wanted to. So finally I got down to doing boolean operations on those shapes... and Blender can't do it. Blender's boolean operations, even doing something with simple unedited meshes of a sphere and a cube, will fail in almost all cases. Differences will add, differences will create non-manifold creations, and sometimes differences won't even wrok at all and just create a hash of lines. And that's with simple geometic primative meshes. Trying to do a boolean subtract of a complex shape like a fishing lure jig from a simple cube will *definitely* fail.

I spent a couple days on this trying boolean ops with simple geometries following youtube tutorials before I gave up and asked for help on #blender on irc.libera.chat. It turns out Blender is just shit at boolean operations and the problem wasn't me. So... I just wasted a week learning a program that can't do what I want. And when I threw my hands in the air and decided to just bend over and try Autodesk Fusion 360 instead I couldn't even get Firefox 88 to be able to download the installer because Autodesk uses such bleeding edge javascript/webcomponents un-HTML even a 6 month old browser can't run it.

I guess for now I'll go back to faking things with SketchUp. I'm just shocked at that software with such a good reputation is so fundementally broken.