tangency-labs/solidcraft

SolidCraft 0.8: model a Raspberry Pi 4 case from an empty design: a sketch dimensioned with parameters, extrude, fillets and shell, a rim rounded in one pick, standoffs patterned on the board's mounting holes, port cut-outs, vent slots, "Pi 4" engraved in a font, a PETG material with its mass in Properties, and a height change in Parameters

A Raspberry Pi 4 case from an empty design: a sketch dimensioned with the board's parameters, extrude, fillet, shell, the rim rounded in one pick, an M2.5 standoff patterned on the 58 × 49 mm hole rectangle, port cut-outs, vent slots, "Pi 4" engraved in DejaVu Sans Bold and a PETG material defined in the design, with its mass in Properties, then height 24 → 32 mm in Parameters and it all rebuilds. 9× playback. Full video, recorded 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. With WinGet: winget install bherbruck.SolidCraft.
• 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.

On SolidCraft 0.11 to 0.14? Its Update now can't install 0.15.0 or later, because the releases moved to a new address. Download the new version once from the links above; after that, updating from inside SolidCraft works again (details).

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).

Community: chat with users and contributors on Discord.

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.

Built with SolidCraft

SELENE, a scientific rover built entirely through SolidCraft's MCP server by @0xlillith: 3,323 editable timeline steps that rebuild with no errors, replayed here at 2× speed. Full video · download the editable model.

What works

• Current-view DXF export from File → Export Current View as DXF, with hidden edges omitted or dashed, shown body placements and the current camera. See view DXF.

• 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. Points the constraints fix relative to known geometry are placed exactly by construction (loci intersections and rigid-cluster decomposition, after Owen 1991 and Fudos–Hoffmann 1997); Levenberg–Marquardt solves the rest, and the rank of its Jacobian gives the remaining degrees of freedom. Constraints: coincident, point on curve, horizontal/vertical, parallel, perpendicular, tangent, curvature (G2), equal, concentric, collinear, midpoint, symmetry, fix; linear, aligned, horizontal, vertical, point-to-line, radius, diameter, angle, arc sweep, arc length and slot length dimensions driven by parameters. Over-constraining edits are rejected; fully constrained geometry turns black. Dragging solves the sketch every frame and rebuilds the model once, when the drag ends. Select a line or its two endpoints, type its dimension and press Enter to commit one undo step; with Sketch Dimension it's D, click, type, Enter. 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: design containers (.solidcraft) with lossless binary mesh payloads; plain JSON remains supported for opening, Save As and export. Desktop Open can show a saved provisional picture from warm geometry caches while rebuilding before editing; caches never replace the parametric design. 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, and assemblies with joints as URDF for robot simulators (docs/urdf.md); 3MF, STL, OBJ and glTF 2.0 (.glb/.gltf, its node tree as components and its materials as appearances) import as mesh bodies (they render, measure, move and export; solid features need B-rep bodies). The mesh.convert command 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/.iges file, insert one into a design, or drop it on the window (docs/step-import.md); FreeCAD .FCStd and Rhino .3dm solids import the same way through cadmpeg in the desktop app and CLI.

• Render: opaque surfaces can use metal fraction, roughness and dielectric IOR in the integrated product viewport and CPU preview PNGs. Existing simple colors remain supported. Fixed direct lighting is a preview; HDRI, refraction and texture maps are not implemented. See opaque surfaces.

• Display meshes from our own tessellation planner: each face becomes a plan of (u, v) points and triangles that shares its edge nodes with its neighbours, so the mesh is watertight. Facets follow the chord tolerance, the facet angle and a longest side, with cells at most 2:1 along straight directions. Box-bounded and four-cornered faces mesh as structured grids. Trimmed faces are cut into four-sided patches: squares around holes, butterflies in round faces, motorcycle traces from concave corners (after Lyon et al. 2019). Each patch then meshes as a Coons grid. Intersection edges are evaluated by Newton on both surfaces. A compute shader evaluates the plans for the whole scene in one dispatch, with a CPU fallback when the GPU can't build it. Planning and evaluating the 78 reference bodies takes about 65 ms, 50–65× faster than the previous mesher.

• 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-cli -- render examples/render-studio.json --out product.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, icons, assets, layers, wasm

UI artwork changes follow the icon specification. The included review tool discovers new icons and keeps unaccepted artwork Open; run cargo xtask icons to check the collection.

Windows builds: cargo xwin build --release --target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc -p solidcraft.

On Windows, macOS and Linux, SolidCraft detects a connected 3D mouse through its HID multi-axis controller interface: a 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator or SpaceMouse, or a homemade device that declares itself one. 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, a speed control and, for each of the cap's six axes, an invert switch and a speed for the 3D mouse. The web app reads it too, through the browser; Firefox needs a 3DxWare setting first (see Getting started › 3D mouse in the browser).

With 3DxWare on Windows, SolidCraft follows 3DxWare's profile for it when there is one, and 3DxWare's object mode (tilt to roll, twist to spin) until there is. The mouse-wheel turns that 3DxWare makes from the cap's motion are ignored, so the view doesn't zoom in steps as the cap tilts.

On Linux SolidCraft reads the 3D mouse through spacenavd when that daemon runs (its socket /var/run/spnav.sock), so what you set in spnavcfg (swapped or inverted axes, sensitivity, dead zones) applies as it does in other programs, and no udev rule is needed. With nothing set there, the motion is the same as without the daemon. Without spacenavd, 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 USB devices with 3Dconnexion's vendor id, and for its Bluetooth ones (where idVendor isn't set, so the HID id is matched instead):

SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="256f", TAG+="uaccess"
SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", KERNELS=="0005:256F:*", TAG+="uaccess"

Older SpaceNavigators use Logitech's vendor id 046d, so add a rule with their product id (see lsusb) instead of matching every Logitech device. A homemade device needs a rule with its own vendor and product id. 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.

SolidCraft finds the axes from the device's report descriptor, so it doesn't matter how a device lays them out: translation and rotation in separate reports (3Dconnexion's wired devices), all six in one (its wireless ones and most homemade devices), after the buttons, or narrower than 16 bits. Each axis is scaled from the range the descriptor declares.

On macOS SolidCraft talks to the 3Dconnexion driver (3DxWare) when it is installed, through the driver's client API (crates/threedx-client; the framework is loaded at run time, never bundled). The driver keeps the device to itself, and sends it only to a program it can identify: SolidCraft as an .app (the packaged app). Without the driver, or with its helper not running, SolidCraft reads the device through IOKit like on Windows.

SolidCraft does not follow 3DxWare's profile on macOS. Its default is 3DxWare's object mode.

In the browser: cd apps/solidcraft-web && trunk build --release --public-url ./ (WebGPU, or WebGL2 with ?webgl; ?sample opens the sample part).

Agents can control the document open in a browser tab through window.solidcraft.execute(...) and window.solidcraft.request(...); see the browser command API.

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, crash_reports, undo, redo, new_design, open, save. Tool calls reach files only in the open design's folder (when it lies inside your home folder, never home itself or a hidden folder), SolidCraft's recovery folder and folders given with --allow-path DIR. Claude Code: claude mcp add solidcraft -- solidcraft-cli mcp. Details, client configuration and an example session: docs/mcp.md.

Architecture

Contributing

SolidCraft uses a familiar parametric CAD workflow: 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.