In loving memory of Windows 3D Builder. Rest in peace.
Two things were built with this release before it was cut: an architectural model of a house at
1:87, and a box with a hinged lid. Everything below is what those two models needed, or what
they found broken.
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 1.4.0
Brick on a wall that already has windows in it
Previously a raised pattern needed a face that filled its own rectangle, so cladding had to go on
before the openings were cut — an order nobody would guess, and one that means a wall can
never be re-clad once it has windows.
The face's boundary is now walked as several loops: the widest is the outline, the rest are
holes. Each hole's own edges become grid lines, so the courses meet the reveal exactly and a
brick standing at the edge of an opening gets its return while the flat face beside it does not.
Four more patterns
Roof tiles, Tiles and Planks join Brick, Wood grain and Stripes — and each starts at
its own proportions, because a brick is not shaped like a roof tile. Brick 3 : 1, roof tile
1.5 : 1, wall tile 1 : 1, plank 8 : 1, and Shape n : 1 to change it. The first roof built
here came out with 39 × 13 cm tiles because it was laid as brick.
Repeat, Stair, and knowing what a millimetre means
- Repeat... — the selection stepped n times along a line, optionally growing as it goes.
One operation, one undo. A flight of steps, a row of dowels, a run of courses. - Stair... — rise, run, width and risers, built as one swept profile rather than a stack of
boxes, with the riser and going reported in real units and a plain word when the result is not
climbable. - Scale 1: on the View tab — 1:87, 1:160, 1:1 or anything typed. No geometry changes; the
properties panel just tells you the part is 9.57 × 7.83 × 2.61 m.
Does it actually fit?
Fit check on the Align tab measures two parts against each other and changes neither:
overlap by 6 × 3 × 16 mm, 0.047 cm³ of shared material, or how far apart they are. Watertight
says a part will print; it says nothing about whether two parts go together. It caught a lid
resting on its own hinge knuckles in a model that looked perfectly right on screen.
Align to, beside it, is the one that moves things: the first object picked is centred on
the second.
Back, Left and Bottom views
With only Front, Right and Top, two walls of any building could not be brought to face the
camera, so cladding them meant turning the object half round and back — which bakes the rotation
into the mesh and shifts its centre a little each time.
Hollow with one side open
A shell whose cavity reaches daylight — the underside of a roof, the back of a façade. The walls
round the open side stand; a part too thin for the wall thickness is still handed back untouched.
The tabs are grouped by what a tool changes
Object is what a thing is made of, Edit is its surface, Align is where it sits. Drop
to plate, Mirror and Lay on face moved to Align; Smooth and Round moved to Edit. The Object tab
went from nineteen buttons to nine.
Smaller things
- Import takes a
.3dfcproject, joining the plate rather than replacing it. - Ctrl+D duplicates and Ctrl+Shift+D duplicates in place — deselect all moves to
Ctrl+Shift+A. Every shortcut is named in its button's tooltip. - Either end of the measuring tape can be dragged after it is down.
- An About box: version, licence, and a Copy details button for bug reports.
- Zoom to fit no longer blanks the viewport in Top view. Looking straight down, the camera's
up vector and its view direction were the same line, and the renderer drew nothing at all. - Enter commits a field. The last box anyone fills in is the one they do not tab out of.
- Two shells sharing a face no longer report themselves watertight — the health check welds
before judging. - Selecting several objects in the object list works through UI Automation, which is the only
route a screen reader has: the viewport exposes nothing. Adding a second row used to replace
the first while the list went on reporting that it could select several.
The engine
CsgPlane.Epsilon was documented as 1e-4 and written as 1e-6. At 90 mm a float steps by 7.6e-6,
so the tolerance sat below the noise floor and coplanar faces classified at random. Every
staircase tore. It is 1e-4 now, as it always said it was.
Known limits
- A face with a round hole in it cannot take a pattern — holes have to be rectangles. Pattern
a wall before merging a boss or a peg onto it. - The Front view lights the model from behind, so a front elevation renders nearly black
while the left and right ones are lit. Cosmetic, but it is the drawing anyone asks for first. - Selecting several objects through automation stops working after an export within a
session. Ctrl+click in the object list is unaffected, and so is everything done with a mouse. - Boolean operations on imported meshes above ~200k triangles are slow. The GPU renders them
fine; the BSP tree is the bottleneck. - Engraving and lettering are refused outright rather than applied badly whenever the result
would not be watertight. The object is never left in a worse state than it started. - No 3MF, and no printer integration.
Free for personal, non-commercial use. Models you make with it are your own.