3DFastCraft 1.3.0

In loving memory of Windows 3D Builder. Rest in peace.

A house has four walls, and until now you could only brick three of them. This release stops
sending face patterns through the boolean engine at all, and stamps drawings as well as words.

Download

3DFastCraft.exe — a single self-contained file. No installer, no .NET runtime needed.
Download it, double-click it. Windows 10/11, 64-bit.

Windows SmartScreen will warn about an unsigned executable the first time — More info →
Run anyway.

New in 1.3.0

All four walls

Putting a raised pattern on the fourth face of a box used to tear it open, every time, at most
sizes. The cause was not the pattern: a boolean's cutting planes are infinite, so patterning one
wall quietly split geometry all over the rest of the model, and by the fourth face the new
pattern had three walls' worth of mismatched edges to land on.

A raised pattern is no longer a boolean. The face's own triangles are thrown away and laid again
around the pattern — a frame joining it to the face's real outline, the pattern itself at two
levels, and a wall where the two meet. Every vertex on the outline is one the model already had,
so nothing else in the object is touched. The result is watertight by construction rather than
by repair, and because nothing accumulates the fourth wall is no harder than the first.

Four walls of brick on a 60 mm cube: three walls and a tear before, four walls now, and three
and a half times faster.

Grain, at last

Raised instead of cut now offers wood as well as brick and boards — the grain lines stand
proud, like the hard rings of a weathered plank. Grain is curves rather than rectangles, so it
takes a second decomposition, and it gains the most from it: four walls of grain on a 60 mm cube
used to give out on the third after thirty-nine seconds, and now all four go on in half a second.

Raised lettering on a plain flat face takes the same road, so a stamp is exact rather than lucky
and cannot dice the object on its way through.

Stamp a drawing

Drawing... in the Emboss panel stamps the filled shapes of an SVG file — a logo, a badge,
an icon — and shows you the shape it read, so you can see the holes came out right before
committing to it.

A drawing becomes exactly what typed letters become: an outline and the loops inside it. So
everything else in the panel works on it unchanged — size, depth, bevel, wrap around a barrel or
a ball, the handles on the face, and cut or raised.

Paths, rectangles, circles, ellipses, polygons and polylines are read, transform is followed
down the tree, and curves and arcs are flattened. Minified exports are read properly — those
write an arc's flags with nothing between them, which most readers choke on.

Where things are

• Text... is now Emboss..., since it stamps drawings too.
• Emboss and Engrave have moved from the Object tab to the Edit tab.
• Buttons inside the side panels have their own style, instead of the ribbon's — which kept a
  square for an icon they never had.

Known limits

• Cut patterns still go through the boolean, because a cut groove is allowed to run off the
  edge of its face and a raised one is not. A fine pattern cut into a face that has been cut
  about already can still refuse to go on; raised has no such trouble.
• A drawing whose shapes overlap each other is stamped the slow way and may not go on at all.
  Which loops are holes is decided by asking whether one lies inside another, and for outlines
  that cross, that question has no answer. Merge overlapping shapes in the drawing program first.
• Text inside an SVG is not read — there is no way to know you have the same fonts. Turn it
  into paths in the drawing program. use and symbol references are not resolved either.
• A bevel means sloping walls, which the retiling has no way to express, so bevelled lettering
  still goes through the boolean.
• Letters with an enclosed middle — O, B, A, D — wrapped round a barrel remain past what the
  boolean will do. They are refused rather than shipped broken.
• Boolean operations on imported meshes above ~200k triangles are slow. The GPU renders them
  fine; the BSP tree is the bottleneck.
• No 3MF, and no printer integration.

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Free for personal, non-commercial use. Anything you model with it is yours.