FSfsloth·Apr 4, 2026Submission
Show HN: AdaShape-3D modeler for intuitive 3D printing parts / Windows 11
I've spent the last years obsessed with a sideproject to build a humanistic 3D modeler for desktop.
By humanistic I mean a tool that stays out of your way, instead of requiring the user to learn both a complex UX surface as well as a complex theoretical basis before being able to model effectively. The GUI is uncrowded and the modeling affordances are only those which are intuitive to present to the user. Which is sort of backwards compared to most CAD packages where the technical complexity takes the front stage. Here the hierarchy is intentionally reversed.
This is still in alpha-stage, but the features are mature enough for feedback and experimentation.
TinkerCAD is actually what comes philosophically closest to this, but it's hobbled either by Autodesk's strategy or by technical limitation to be a really good tool beyond certain comp
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lexity.
The ambition here eventually is to provide a tool that has same intuitive capability as building Lego bricks, while not compromising on engineering qualities.
The main intent is to make extrusion based modeling operations super easy, to offer robust STL and STEP import and allow complex modeling via boolean operations.
The modeling logic is parametric and volume based - the surface presentation is always a discretized water tight triangle mesh.
This is the clearest philosophical differentiator to traditional CAD/CAM packages - or visual editors like Blender. Rather than force the user to nurse surface topology at every stage, the modeler will only permit those operations that result in a correct output.
This is not an SDF (signed distance field) modeler. The domain model is fully based on parametric analytic shapes. This means the tessellation is crisp and specific.
The modeling data is immutable and serialized to disk while modeling. For the user this gives a perfect undo and zero data loss.
It's built for efficiency first - my test workhorse is a Thinkpad T14 Gen 2 i5 with an integrated gpu.
It's not supposed to be a replacement for complex surface design tools like Fusion 360 or sculpting software like Nomad Sculpt or Z Brush.
You can find a review of current features in the youtube playlist linked below [0] and the link to the latest alpha 0.1.7 download from the homepage [1]. The test binary is provided via github release [2] but this is not an open source project.
I know some people hate videos over reading and I'm one of you but I don't really have bandwidth to both develop features and write good instruction copy.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCOf_M8a2MZJqgKXgjod2...
[1] https://adashape.com
[2] https://github.com/AdaShape/adashape-open-testing/releases/t...