CAD + GamePad

[ohrly?]

I did this earlier for a quick animation. I had success by exporting the entire assembly to a single STL (it froze up if we imported too many STL files), then opening that file in Blender and applying a decimate modifier (because we had well over a million polygons).
We didn't need color, but maybe you could select each part by CTRL-L and use vertex groups to assign materials?

Also, when you decimate, go nuts. I think we used 0.05

[Jibri Wright]

LOL dude I love Blender! I have made some pretty cool 3d things in it and actually have gotten pretty good at modeling humans! I'm an artist so it fit me perfectly. I am also the main one on my team CADing the robot. I didn't think about using Blender for CAD, but tell me if you get any success using Blender!

[bvisness]

Blender really isn't a CAD program, it's an animation and rendering program. I would definitely avoid using it for CAD...but it makes pretty awesome animations!

The end result of all my exporting work today is this: http://skfb.ly/5hfe1dba

Which is a special sneak peek at our robot design this year

[ProgrammerJoe]

^ Whatever it was, it completely nuked Chrome on my machine, so I guess it's impressive.

STL or STEP would be the best way to get into Blender, with a 3ds work around if you really wanted to pull some teeth. The thing that seems to be made for the stuff I want to do is Cogmation's RobotSim, cogmation.com, but I haven't gotten a response for the trial, so I'm guessing vaporware?