8e0c3d2794
A cut-out made in the flat pattern could cross a bend only with edges
running along the bend or square to it: a round hole or a slanted slot
over a bend line failed to fold ("not supported yet: curved cut-outs
across a bend", "... cut-out edges running across a bend at an angle").
Sheet: a flat edge in a bend zone now folds whichever way it runs: along
the bend to a line, across it to an arc, and any other way to a curve on
the bend's cylinder (a slanted line to a helix). The curve is carried as
a chain of cubic Hermite pieces fitted within 1e-7 mm on both faces of
the sheet, with breaks that depend on the flat edge only, so the top
face, the bottom face and the wall share them. The wall between the two
chains is a ruled surface with radial rulings: the cut-out's wall stays
square to the sheet. The bend's own faces stay exact cylinders, now sized
to the whole boundary of their cell (a curved edge may bulge past its
corners).
Kernel: such an edge has no line, arc or conic form, so the sewing
interface gets EdgeSpec::Chain (a chain of cubic Bézier pieces: a cubic
B-spline with triple inner knots, its ends on the shared vertices) and
SurfSpec::Ruled (two chains joined by straight lines, so a wall built
from the chains holds them exactly). The sheet module's rev_edge becomes
EdgeSpec::reversed, so the new variant is handled where edges are
reversed.
The test for "along" and "across" is in millimetres (1e-6 mm at the
edge's ends) instead of relative 1e-9, so coordinates rounded by a script
fold as drawn.
Tests. Kernel: a box with one wall bulging as a cubic (chains of two
pieces at the bottom and the top, the wall ruled between them) sews to a
valid solid of the analytic volume, 27.6 (measured 27.59965); chains with
the wrong number of control points, a NaN or too many pieces, and a ruled
wall between chains of different piece counts, are refused. Sheet: a slot
turned 30° and a round hole across 72°, 90° and 108° bends fold to valid
solids that lose the cut-out's flat area times the thickness (K = 0.5:
400 and 100.53 mm³, measured within 0.02); a slanted flat edge folds to
its exact helix within 1e-7 mm (measured 1.9e-8) on both faces; lines
along and across the bend keep their line and arc. Engine:
fold_through_cut_outs now expects a round hole across a fold to fold, and
to unfold to the same round hole; the per-bend machining guard (#296)
sews a bend that carries a round cut-out, so a hole beside it cuts and a
hole in the bend is still refused.
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
Co-authored-by: bherbruck <[email protected]>
SolidCraft
An open-source parametric 3D CAD application built in pure Rust.
Sketch, constrain, and build solids with a parametric feature timeline. Change a dimension and watch your model rebuild. Run it on your desktop, in your browser, or let AI agents model through the built-in MCP server.
Start with an empty design and draw the original parametric electronics enclosure in the English desktop UI: rounded corners, a shell, a USB port sketched directly on the wall and a four-boss pattern. Change width from 80 → 100 mm and wall thickness from 2 → 3 mm in Parameters and watch it rebuild. Original animated pointer and click cues; 4× playback. Full video, generated with the demo script.
Download
- Windows: download and run the installer. Also for ARM64 and 32-bit PCs, or as a portable zip that runs without installing.
- macOS: open the disk image and drag SolidCraft into Applications (Apple silicon and Intel).
- Linux: download the AppImage, allow it to run as a program and open it.
Or install the .deb (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint) or .rpm (Fedora,
openSUSE), or use Flatpak.
With Snap:
sudo snap install solidcraft(Snap Store, or the .snap file). For ARM64: AppImage, .deb, .rpm. - Web: try it in your browser, no install.
The downloads aren't signed yet. On Windows, if SmartScreen warns you, choose More info, then Run anyway. On macOS, the first time, right-click SolidCraft in Applications and choose Open.
Older versions, checksums and other formats are on the releases page. Install details, upgrading from earlier builds and building from source are in Getting started.
Documentation: the SolidCraft book (user guide, developer guide and command reference; sources in docs/book).
Status: early but usable for simple parts. 75 of 76 public reference parts match their analytic or FreeCAD-computed volume, area, centre of mass and bounding box (docs/oracle.md); the other is a tracked bug. These checks do not establish complete geometric or workflow equivalence. The commands SolidCraft has are listed by area in docs/features.md; status and plans are in ROADMAP.md. Open work and known bugs are in GitHub issues, and help is welcome: see CONTRIBUTING.md.
What works
- Sketches on origin planes, offset planes or planar faces: lines, rectangles, circles, arcs, polygons, slots, ellipses, fit/control splines, conics and text; construction geometry, projection, trimming, fillets and chamfers, including corners at the origin. New face attachments retain supported construction identities and chosen occurrences; missing sources expose an explicit plane repair workflow. See face attachments. Explicitly closed fit splines and closed associative offsets use periodic C2 interpolation. Supported convex line-and-arc offsets retain their identity when an inset consumes corner arcs, and linked extrusions follow the current boundary. Breaking the association freezes the boundary and keeps existing extrusions usable. Curve drawing and picking adapt together to zoom and display scale, including small circles at Fit and sketches in placed components.
- Constraints and dimensions solved by our own solver (damped Gauss–Newton with degree-of-freedom analysis): coincident, horizontal/vertical, parallel, perpendicular, tangent, equal, concentric, collinear, midpoint, symmetry, fix; linear, aligned, horizontal, vertical, radius, diameter and angle dimensions driven by parameters. Over-constraining edits are rejected; fully constrained geometry turns black. Select a line or its two endpoints, type its dimension and press Enter to commit one undo step. Fit keeps sketch geometry clear of the palette and navigation controls.
- Profiles found automatically, including regions split by lines and holes inside outlines. Newly captured complete adaptive boundaries retain their outer and hole source identities when spline span counts change. Partial or ambiguous boundaries do not qualify.
- Features on a parametric timeline: extrude, revolve, sweep, loft, fillet/chamfer, shell, draft, holes, threads, patterns, mirror, split, combine, move and construction geometry. The timeline rebuilds incrementally; features can be edited, suppressed, renamed, reordered and deleted. Supported geometry and current limitations are described in ROADMAP.md. New revolves preserve symmetric and two-sided angular placement across reversed axes; older designs retain their saved convention when reopened or edited.
- Parameters and configurations with unit-aware expressions (
2 * width + 5 mm,angle / 2), ordered rules, feature suppression and per-row body materials/appearances. - Assemblies with nested components and occurrences, joints, motion studies, contact sets, interference and material-aware mass properties. Recorded body transfers preserve modelling history and world placement; 3D sketch wires retain their coordinate frames through edits.
- Sheet metal with flanges, hems, fold/unfold/refold, material cutouts, flat patterns, retained shallow prismatic pockets, exact line/arc/circle DXF outlines and bend tables; plastic enclosure features and rules. Pocket depth and side survive unfold/refold and appear separately from through-hole outlines in the flat preview and DXF.
- Files: designs as JSON (
.solidcraft), export to STEP (AP242 with body names, colours and components as assemblies; revolved faces as native planes, cylinders, cones, spheres and tori), IGES 5.3 (manifold solid B-reps with names and colours), 3MF, STL (binary/ASCII) and OBJ; 3MF, STL and OBJ import as mesh bodies (they render, measure, move and export; solid features need B-rep bodies). Convert Mesh reconstructs supported closed constant-section parts as parametric solids with planar and circular cylindrical faces; STEP import (AP203/AP214/AP242 solids, assemblies, units, names, colours) and IGES import (manifold solid B-reps, or trimmed and bounded surfaces sewn into solids) as a base feature that later features build on — open a.step/.stp/.igs/.igesfile, insert one into a design, or drop it on the window (docs/step-import.md). - Desktop app (egui + wgpu): toolbar with workspace tabs, browser, timeline, 3D viewport with axis view and navigation bar, sketch tools, feature dialogs, command palette, and a JSON-lines control channel so agents and tests can drive it. Feature errors and Help can open an editable Create Issue draft with relevant context and an optional reviewed screenshot; opening GitHub does not submit the report.
- Headless CLI
solidcraft-cli: run command scripts, measure (volume, area, centre of mass, face/edge/vertex counts), export, render PNG snapshots and replay reference recipes. - MCP server
solidcraft-cli mcp: AI agents model, measure and look at parts headless or in the running app (see below).
Build and run
cargo run --release -p solidcraft -- --sample # desktop app with a sample part
cargo run --release -p solidcraft-cli -- commands # the command registry
cargo run --release -p solidcraft-cli -- run examples/bracket.json --out bracket.step
cargo run --release -p solidcraft-cli -- snapshot examples/bracket.json --out bracket.png
cargo run --release -p solidcraft -- part.step # open a STEP file as a new design
cargo run --release -p solidcraft-cli -- eval part.step # measure an imported STEP file
cargo xtask ci # fmt, clippy, tests, assets, layers, wasm
Windows builds: cargo xwin build --release --target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc -p solidcraft.
On Windows and Linux, SolidCraft detects a connected 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator or SpaceMouse through its multi-axis HID interface. Move the cap to pan and zoom, and tilt or twist it to rotate the 3D view. While editing a sketch, the cap pans and zooms without changing the sketch view. The Navigation page in Preferences has an on/off switch and a speed control for the 3D mouse.
On Linux SolidCraft reads /dev/hidrawN directly, so the logged-in user needs access to the
device. A udev rule that adds the uaccess tag does that, for example
/etc/udev/rules.d/70-3d-mouse.rules for devices with 3Dconnexion's vendor id:
SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="256f", TAG+="uaccess"
Older SpaceNavigators use Logitech's vendor id 046d; add a rule with their product id (see lsusb)
instead of matching every Logitech device. Reload with sudo udevadm control --reload && sudo udevadm trigger, then replug the device. The Flatpak
sandbox does not expose hidraw devices, so the 3D mouse only works with native builds there for now.
Devices that send all six axes in HID report 1 (some homemade ones do) are recognised from their
report descriptor, so they work as well.
In the browser: cd apps/solidcraft-web && trunk build --release --public-url ./ (WebGPU, or
WebGL2 with ?webgl; ?sample opens the sample part).
Scripts
A script is a JSON list of commands, the same ones the UI runs:
{"commands": [
{"command": "sketch.create", "params": {"plane": "XY"}},
{"command": "sketch.rectangle.two_point", "params": {"p0": [0, 0], "p1": [40, 30]}},
{"command": "solid.extrude", "params": {"distance": 20}},
{"command": "solid.fillet", "params": {"edges": [[0, 0, 10]], "radius": 3}}
]}
AI agents (MCP)
solidcraft-cli mcp is a Model Context Protocol server on
stdio. Headless it runs its own design session; with --connect 127.0.0.1:PORT it drives the app
started with solidcraft --control PORT, so you can watch the agent model. Tools:
list_commands, execute, batch, inspect_design, measure, body_topology,
set_parameter, screenshot (returns the image), export, undo, redo, new_design, open,
save. Claude Code: claude mcp add solidcraft -- solidcraft-cli mcp. Details, client
configuration and an example session: docs/mcp.md.
Architecture
| Layer | Crates | Role |
|---|---|---|
| L0 | geom |
vectors, planes, profiles, meshes and their measures |
| L1 | sketch, kernel, render |
constraint solver and profiles; the B-rep kernel boundary (truck); view math and CPU rasterizer |
| L2 | doc |
parameters, expressions, the feature timeline and its incremental evaluation |
| L3 | io |
design files, STL/OBJ/STEP/3MF export, STEP and 3MF/STL import features |
| L4 | engine |
the session and the command registry (everything is a command) |
| L5 | ui-egui, mcp |
the swappable desktop front end; the MCP server (headless or bridged to the app) |
| apps | solidcraft, solidcraft-cli |
desktop app, headless CLI |
Contributing
Coming from Autodesk Fusion? SolidCraft uses familiar parametric CAD workflows: constrained sketches, solid features, an editable timeline, parameters and assemblies. See the roadmap for supported operations and current limitations.
See CONTRIBUTING.md: how to build and test, the code map, the clean-room and licence rules, and where help is wanted most.
Licence
MIT OR Apache-2.0, at your option. Developed under the clean-room contribution rules; third-party code and assets retain their documented licences and attribution.
SolidCraft is independent. Behaviour is designed from public documentation, general CAD conventions and user feedback. Reference tests use analytic values and open-source tools. SolidCraft is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by Autodesk. Autodesk and Fusion are trademarks of Autodesk, Inc.