meshes and sculpting

Where CAD builds exact solids, meshes are made of triangles you can push, smooth and combine, the way Blender does. The same node handles both, and a boolean can cut a mesh with a CAD solid.

polygon mode

Choose Mesh ▸ Polygon in the mode picker. The ribbon's Create group has Primitive (<kbd>Shift</kbd> <kbd>A</kbd>): box, sphere, cylinder, plane or torus, with width, height, depth, segments and rings. Primitives are built along Y; stand a cylinder up by rotating it.

Pick what you work on with Select vertices (<kbd>1</kbd>), Select edges (<kbd>2</kbd>) and Select faces (<kbd>3</kbd>). The same key again clears the filter.

tool	key	does
Move · Rotate · Scale	<kbd>G</kbd> <kbd>R</kbd> <kbd>S</kbd>	transform a mesh; tick copy to duplicate it
Extrude faces	<kbd>E</kbd>	pushes faces along their normals
Bevel	<kbd>Ctrl</kbd> <kbd>B</kbd>	turns picked edges into flat strips
Boolean	<kbd>B</kbd>	union, difference or intersection of two bodies
Group	<kbd>Ctrl</kbd> <kbd>G</kbd>	names a set of vertices or faces for later steps
Subdivide · Smooth		Catmull-Clark or Loop subdivision; Laplacian smoothing
Decimate · Remesh		fewer triangles by edge collapse; an even triangle grid
Repair · Solidify		weld vertices, drop broken faces, fix winding; give a surface a wall thickness

A boolean needs both bodies closed and watertight. If it fails, run Repair on the input first. Its second body is used up. A boolean also accepts a CAD solid as its first body and returns a mesh.

sculpt mode

Choose Mesh ▸ Sculpt, select a mesh and paint on it. Four brushes: Grab (<kbd>G</kbd>), Clay (<kbd>C</kbd>), Smooth (<kbd>S</kbd>) and Inflate (<kbd>I</kbd>). <kbd>[</kbd> shrinks the brush and <kbd>]</kbd> grows it; Radius and Strength are in Properties.

Your strokes are saved as one Sculpt step in the timeline. Only you write strokes: the modeler pixie can build the shape under them and re-use them, but doesn't sculpt. Start from a primitive, a Subdivided block or an imported mesh; sculpt needs enough triangles to bend.

bring a mesh in

Import mesh takes .obj, .stl, .glb or .gltf. Add it from the ribbon, press Choose file…, and set Scale (a multiplier; glTF metres become millimetres on their own) and Weld vertices (merge STL points so the mesh is connected).

Models made by an AI 3D-generation node arrive as GLB files, so this is how one becomes something you can edit. The custom buckle's centrepiece is a 299,000-triangle GLB, repaired, scaled and flattened, then fused into the buckle with a boolean.

an SVG drawing becomes a solid

SVG extrudes the filled shapes and stroked lines of a drawing into a solid lying flat, SVG up being +Y. It reads the drawing by reference: a file node holding an SVG, or a design, on the same canvas. When the drawing changes, the step is marked stale until the model has read it again.

Settings in Properties: width (mm across the ink, 50), depth (extrusion, 2), z (height of the bottom), center, rotate, mirror, use (auto, fill or stroke) and strokeWidth for lines. Filled shapes keep their holes.

The source is shown there read-only. Choose it by asking the modeler: "extrude the G drawing 3 mm". Until the drawing has been read the step says it is waiting for it. The custom buckle's two interlocking bands are SVG steps stroked at a parameter width, and the lettering engraved into them is a second SVG, cut out with a boolean.

lighten a plate

Lighten cuts pockets into a plate to save weight and material. Properties:

setting	default	meaning
pattern	hex	hex, tri, square or round
cell	10 mm	pocket size
wall	1.8 mm	web between pockets and ring round kept features
rim	3 mm	solid band along every edge
floor	0.6 mm	left under each pocket; 0 cuts through
side	top	top or bottom

Pass bodies that sit on the plate in Keep solid under and the pockets stay clear of them. Because every number is a parameter, you can retune the cell size and the model is lightened again.

limits & good to know

• A boolean or repair step takes time on very dense meshes. Decimate an import before cutting with it.
• Meshes export as GLB, STL and OBJ. A new node starts with STEP, GLB and Render; ask the modeler to declare an STL for the mesh you want to print.
• A sculpt step stores your strokes, not a recipe: you can't drive them from a parameter.

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