Free add-on turns a Blender scene into drawings in one click

A developer going by the handle Ely has published Ichno in the official Blender extensions catalog, an add-on that turns a three-dimensional scene into a finished technical drawing with a single click. The output is a multi-page vector PDF or SVG with orthogonal and isometric views, dimensions in place, a title block and a bill of materials. The add-on is free and the code is open under the GPL-3.0 license.

The target audience is spelled out very specifically: furniture makers and joiners, interior designers, industrial designers and makers printing on a 3D printer. In other words, those who model in Blender but deliver their work as printed plans that someone will use to saw, mill or assemble a product.

What exactly ends up on the sheet

Ichno builds front, side and top views plus an isometric one, and the isometric can be taken from any angle of the model or from the current viewport angle. The projection can be switched between first and third angle (ISO E and ISO A) — in these two systems the views are arranged differently on the sheet. Visible lines come from Line Art, hidden ones can be shown with a dashed line, three line weights are available, and the scale is chosen automatically from a standard series (metric or imperial) or set manually.

The rest of the sheet's equipment:

• overall and chain dimensions in mm, cm, m or inches, with the option to duplicate the values in a second unit system;
• a coordinate ruler or an architectural grid (A, B, C / 1, 2, 3);
• formats from A4 to A0, as well as Letter, Tabloid and ANSI C and D, in portrait and landscape orientation;
• a title block with company name and logo, drawing number, author and date, a revision table and arbitrary fields, plus a legend of abbreviations, notes and a rights notice;
• a bill of materials that counts parts by object name, by collection or by custom property;
• a "one collection — one sheet" layout, each with its own views and scale, assembled into a single multi-page PDF.

That last point is useful in practice: if the scene is already sorted into collections, the documentation set comes out structured without slicing sheets by hand. The bill of materials is pulled from the same scene data, so after editing the model, recalculating amounts to running it again. Linked and instanced collections are drawn and counted as a single part.

The computation runs in the background, on a copy of the file

Ichno is built unconventionally for an add-on: it spins up a second instance of Blender in background mode and works on a temporary copy of the .blend file. The user's scene is not altered in the process. While the drawing is being computed you can keep working, and the computation can be interrupted at any moment.

The price for this is time. For models with millions of triangles the author promises a few minutes of computation; a Fast mode is provided for rough runs, or there is the advice to break the work down to one sheet per subassembly. Among the notable gaps: there is no manual placement of dimensions or sections yet, the drawing shows only overall and chain dimensions — refining it inside the add-on is not possible, only editing the resulting SVG or PDF in an external editor. The add-on works best with polygonal models.

Where to get it and what you need

The current version is 1.0.4, dated October 31, 2026. Blender 4.3 or newer is required, with testing stated up to 5.2; Windows, macOS and Linux are supported. The interface and the drawings themselves are available in English and French. Ichno can be installed straight from the Get Extensions menu by name or downloaded as a zip archive from the releases on GitHub. The only permission the add-on requests is file system access: it saves the drawings and the temporary copy of the scene. Version 1.0.4 added a "Folder per Drawing" option that puts all of a drawing's files into a folder named with its number, and fixed export when the drawing number contains characters not allowed on Windows.

Why drafting tools are catching up in Blender right now

Ichno looks like a symptom of a larger process. Blender long ago moved beyond film and games: people use it to design furniture, exhibition stands, cabinet products and models for printing, but documentation has remained the weak spot of the pipeline all this time. A drawing had to be either assembled by hand with the Line Art modifier and cameras with orthographic projection, or the geometry exported to CAD and finished there. Both routes cost time and require a second tool in the chain.

A small ecosystem of third-party solutions for dimensions and drafting graphics has already formed around this gap, mostly paid or oriented toward architectural documentation. Ichno differs in that it covers not a single operation but the whole route from model to signed sheet, and does so for free and with open code. Against the backdrop of the official extensions catalog, which has simplified both publishing and installing add-ons, such narrowly specialized tools have begun appearing noticeably more often: the barrier to entry for a solo developer has dropped sharply.

If the trend continues, small furniture and product workshops will have fewer and fewer reasons to keep a separate CAD license alongside Blender just for final documentation. For now the project is young: it has no sections and no manual editing of dimensions, which means complex joints and cross-sections will still have to be drawn up elsewhere. The author himself describes these limitations as temporary, so development will probably head in exactly that direction.

Which part of Ichno's drafting package matters more to you?

• Views and dimensions
• A standards-compliant title block