From Blender to the CNC: cut lists out of Home Builder, and the VCarve gadgets level up

Last post I mentioned two things on the bench: cut lists out of Blender, and a round of VCarve gadget updates. Here’s where they stand. Shop-test results and photos will follow in a later post.

The problem: great design software, no shop paperwork

I wanted a real cabinet CAD — not just the box, but the whole room: walls, kitchens, fireplace mantels, bookcases. Fusion’s cabinet add-ons fell short. So instead of writing one from scratch, I went looking for something good to build on.

That turned out to be Home Builder 5, a Blender add-on by Andrew Peel. It lays out rooms and builds every cabinet part to the style you pick — sides, backs, stretchers, face frames, shelves, doors, drawer boxes, notches and rabbets included.

What it didn’t give me was the paperwork a shop runs on. So I built a companion.

Dawn Millwork: the cut list add-on

Dawn Millwork sits alongside Home Builder — it doesn’t change Home Builder’s code, it just reads what Home Builder builds. Place a sink base or a pantry, change the style or the width, and the cut list follows.

One export gives you:

A printable cut list with checkboxes, parts grouped by cabinet and stock type, a materials summary, and sheet estimates
A cut list CSV for Excel, in fractions and decimal inches
A door and drawer-front list with finished sizes and door style — ready to feed straight into Door Nest
A JSON file with everything, for Cabinet Nest

The shop rules are mine, set once: material and edge banding per stock class, doors as finished sizes or broken into stiles/rails/panels, joinery (dado, rabbet, dowel, pocket screw, biscuit, mortise-and-tenon), and drawer boxes sized from the real cabinet openings using my standards.

Before it ever touched my shop, it got checked against Home Builder itself: all 70 face-frame products placed, and every one of 831 parts matched the 3D model’s dimensions.

Export to VCarve

This is the part I’m proudest of. Dawn Millwork doesn’t try to nest — VCarve Pro does that better. Instead it exports the parts by material, and a small VCarve gadget, Dawn Millwork Open Job, opens a new job at the right sheet size and my measured material thickness and pulls the parts right in.

Design in Blender → one click → parts in VCarve, ready to nest and toolpath.

Print Jobs

And for the customer and the shop floor: a Mozaik-style job packet — plan and elevation drawings, per-cabinet assembly sheets, face-frame sheets, door reports, drawer-box and hardware reports, and a priced quote — all with my company name and logo on it.

The VCarve gadgets level up

What’s been going into them:

Cabinet Nest got a faster wizard (trimmed down to a handful of pages), separate base and upper cabinet entry, face-frame options for how the top and bottom sit, separate shelf-pin spacing for uppers, shelf-specific thickness so 3/4” shelves nest on their own sheets, and an optional solid-wood shelf nosing that shows up on the cut list.
Door Nest builds doors around real Amana cutter geometry pulled from the tool database, so every vector sits exactly where the bit’s center needs to be.
Next up: drawer boxes — dovetail, butt, or dado corners; flush, raised-dado, or rabbeted bottoms; any bottom thickness.

What’s next

Shop testing — real cuts, and a full write-up with photos of what broke and what got fixed
Drawer box gadget
Frameless and closet cabinets
Hinge and shelf-pin boring
Sharing the gadgets with other VCarve users

Home Builder 5 is by Andrew Peel and is GPL-3.0. Dawn Millwork is a companion add-on and doesn’t modify Home Builder.