by BsIngA·Workflow
Images © BsIngA. Used for product review; image policy.
CAD-Helper earns its place for handling the tedious side of imported CAD assemblies, from reconnecting hierarchies and flattening structures to detecting instances, through operators that mostly work on your current selection.
CAD-Helper is a Blender extension built for imported CAD assemblies. Its operators aim to simplify cleaning and restructuring, which is especially helpful for larger assemblies with hundreds of parts and many nested sub-assemblies. Most operators act on selections, working on one or multiple objects within the assembly structure.
For selection, it can select parent or child objects and recursively select all child elements, with or without extending the current selection. Filtering covers name (simple string match and RegEx) and object type such as EMPTY, MESH, and CURVE, plus filter-and-select by polygon count, hierarchy depth, and bounding box size.
Clean-up operators delete objects while reconnecting their children to the grand-parents, remove leaf empties, flatten hierarchies, and flatten-and-join meshes with modifiers applied first. Additional tools clean mesh objects, resize empties without affecting children, and set an empty's origin to the average of its children. Instance detection groups identical objects and links them to share mesh data. The 0.7.0 release added mesh normal cleanup and minor UI improvements.
CAD-Helper is best for blender users cleaning and restructuring large CAD assemblies with hundreds of parts and many nested sub-assemblies.
CAD-Helper is completely free to download and use.
CAD-Helper is listed as compatible with Blender 5.0 and newer, so you'll need a current Blender build to run it. It's distributed as a modern Blender extension, which you can find through Edit > Preferences > Get Extensions by searching for CAD-Helper. The extension does not require special permissions. If you're on an older Blender release, check the developer's GitHub page and the version history for details, since the version listed here targets Blender 5.0 as its minimum supported release before you install it.
CAD-Helper supports macOS on Apple Silicon, Windows, and Linux, covering the main desktop platforms Blender runs on. It's a compact extension that installs through Blender's own extension system, and it does not require special permissions. If the embedded demo video doesn't play on your platform, the developer notes you can open it directly. For platform-specific download builds, the developer's page lists packaged versions covering Windows, macOS Apple Silicon, and Linux so you can pick the one that matches your setup.
CAD-Helper installs as a modern Blender extension. Open Edit > Preferences > Get Extensions and search for CAD-Helper to install or update it directly inside Blender. Alternatively, you can download the packaged file from the developer's page and use drag and drop into Blender, or install it from disk through the extensions preferences. The extension does not require special permissions. One tip from the developer: use FreeCAD to convert STEP files to glb before bringing your CAD assemblies into Blender.
CAD-Helper is listed as free here and released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later, an open-source license. You can get it through Blender's Get Extensions panel, or download and install it from disk. Because licensing terms can change, check the developer's GitHub page for the current license and source code. The extension is open source, with its code available on the developer's repository, so you can review how the operators work before running them on production assemblies.
CAD-Helper's instance detection groups identical objects by vertex count, face area, bounding box axis lengths, and bounding box volume. The detected groups can then be linked so they share the same mesh data-block. The developer flags that this might produce unwanted behaviour, since false positives can occur, and recommends checking the outcome. When you're working through a large assembly with many similar parts, it's worth reviewing which objects were grouped before linking them, so unintended matches don't get merged into shared data.
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