Studio

Studio is a CAD page for designing printable parts, built for an AI to drive. Describe a part, or a change to a model you have, in its Ask AI box or to an assistant connected over MCP, and watch it designed step by step. Everything an AI does there you can do yourself too, from shapes and sketches, and every change you can make is a tool an AI can use, though a small local model on the compact tool set gets only the basic ones.

Studio is in the sidebar, under Tools, for everyone on the instance.

Designing

Studio opens on the design and the Ask AI box alone. The Edit button (the pencil) at the top brings in the toolbar, with undo and redo first, the side panels and the status bar, and turns them off again. Out of edit mode you can still turn the view, select bodies for Ask AI, and undo or redo (⌘Z). The Features and Properties panels each fold away to their side with the arrow in their header, leaving a tab with their name there that opens them again; the panels button at the right of the status bar does the same, beside the print check and Studio settings.

A design is a list of features, built in order:

• Shapes: box, cylinder, cone, sphere, torus and thread, from the toolbar. Each starts at the middle of the bed, standing on it. A thread is ISO metric (an M8 has a 1.25 mm pitch unless you change it): External is a threaded rod, Internal the solid to subtract for a nut’s thread, a little larger by its clearance so a printed rod fits.
• Sketches: pick Sketch and a plane (top, front or right) or On a face of a body, then draw on it. Line and Arc draw one outline between them, as in other CAD: click from point to point, switch to Arc for a curve (click where it ends, then a point it passes through) and back to Line, and close it on its first point, by double-click or with Enter; Backspace takes back the last click. An outline of only lines is a polygon, so its corners can be rounded. Rectangles, circles and polygons draw in one go; a rectangle or polygon can have rounded corners. A shape marked as a hole is cut out of the others. Extrude pulls the sketch into a solid: a distance, both ways or from an offset, with sides that taper and ends rounded or bevelled. Revolve turns it round one of the sketch’s axes, all the way or part of it. Either can make a new body, or join, cut or intersect one you click. Add path puts an SVG path among a sketch’s shapes, pasted from a drawing program or typed, in the sketch’s millimetres with y up.
• Loft and Sweep: select two sketches or more and Loft makes the solid that passes through their outlines in the order you selected them, as a bottle from a square base to a round neck. Sweep pulls a sketch’s outline along a path of points (a pipe, a handle, a rail). As in other CAD, the profile stays where you drew it: the path starts on the sketch’s plane, square to it, and a new sweep’s path starts out of the middle of the profile for you to edit.
• Text: the Text tool writes words as a solid in one step: raised letters on a plane, or on a body’s flat face embossed (raised from it) or engraved (cut into it). Letter height is a capital’s height; 6 mm or more prints well. The fonts are the 21 bold faces Thingport carries for tools, each shown in its own face in the list. The words, font and size stay editable on the text’s sketch, and Add text in a sketch puts text among its other shapes. A font without a letter you typed (some lack Lithuanian or Polish letters) says so, and names the fonts that have it.
• Trace picture: turns a picture’s shapes into an outline to make solid: a logo, a silhouette, lettering, a drawing. Drop, paste or choose a picture and see what it traces to beside it: dark shapes on a light ground, or light on dark with Invert; see-through counts as light. The threshold is found for you, or set it yourself; less detail smooths away specks and jags. Holes stay holes, and what’s inside them stays solid. Make it a solid of a height straight away, or only the sketch, to extrude, revolve or cut with. Its size, threshold and detail can be changed later in the properties panel, which traces it again.
• Library models: Open… in the design’s menu has a Library tab with your models’ STL, 3MF, STEP, OBJ and GLB files. Open makes a new design from one; Insert brings it into the design that’s open. Open in Thingport Studio, on a model’s page and on its right-click menu in any grid of models, does the same from there, asking which file when it has several. It comes in at its own size, centred on the bed, and the design keeps its own copy, so changing the model later doesn’t change the design. A 3MF brings its first plate. A mesh with gaps can be moved, scaled and exported, but not combined. A model of several loose pieces comes in as one body, and Studio says how many: Separate makes each its own.
• Combining: select two bodies or more and pick Union, Subtract or Intersect. The first one you selected is the one the others are joined to, cut from or overlapped with. Hull wraps one body or more in the tightest convex body around them, as a rounded slot from two cylinders.

Designs stay editable: change a box’s width, or a sketch’s circle, and everything built from it follows. The bodies a boolean was made from are folded under it in the feature list, and deleting the boolean gives them back.

Parameters in the design’s menu names the numbers a design hangs on, each with its unit as in other CAD: a length (mm, cm or in, such as wall = 2 mm), an angle (°), or none, for a count. Type = and a formula in any size field (=wall * 2 + 10) and the field follows it, marked ƒx; change the parameter and every field that follows it changes too. A formula takes + - * / % ^, brackets, pi, functions such as min, max, round and sqrt, and numbers with units (2 in + 5 mm, 45°). A length field takes only a length and a count only a plain number, so wall * wall in a width is refused. A bare number added to a length is in the design’s units, and is kept with that unit written in (wall + 1 in an inch design is kept as wall + 1 in), so switching units never changes a size. Typing a plain number into the field lets its formula go.

Units

As in other CAD, each design has its own units, mm, cm or in, switched in the status bar along the bottom or in Studio settings (the gear at the right of the status bar), and undone like any change. Every size field shows and takes them: a bare number is in the design’s units, and one typed with its own (2 in, 5 mm, 3") is converted. The status bar, Measure and the print check read out in them, and the grid steps in them. Switching units changes no size: a design is kept in millimetres, and so are its commands and what an assistant reads, which then talks to you in your units. Studio settings also sets the units new designs start in, kept on your account.

The grid

The grid behind a design works as in other CAD. Adaptive (the default), it follows the zoom: finer lines fade in as you zoom in and out as you zoom out, stepping by tens (1 mm, 1 cm, 10 cm) or, in inches, by fours (1/16, 1/4, 1 in), with every tenth (fourth) line darker; it fades away towards the horizon. Fixed, it keeps the spacing you set: major lines so far apart, divided into 2, 4, 5 or 10. Sketch points and moved bodies snap to the finest lines that show, so zooming in snaps finer. The Grid section of Studio settings turns the grid and snapping on or off, and sets the spacing and how dense an adaptive grid is; it’s kept on your account.

Changing a body

Hole and the Modify menu work on a body you have. Each opens a small panel over the view: click what it works on, set its numbers, watch the preview, then OK (or Esc to cancel). If it can’t be done, the panel says why, and OK waits until it can.

• Press/pull: click a flat face and move it out or in, the body growing or shrinking with it.
• Fillet and Chamfer: click straight edges to round or bevel; click one again to let it go. Two edges meeting at a corner meet in a mitre, three at a square corner (as on a box) in a ball. A rounding too big for its faces, or a corner it can’t blend, is refused rather than made wrong. A cylinder’s or an extrude’s own rim has its own setting in the properties panel.
• Hole: click where to drill, into the surface: a depth or right through, plain, counterbored or countersunk.
• Shell: hollows the body with walls of a thickness, and clicked flat faces are left open, as a tray’s top. Flat walls come out exactly that thick. Bodies over 20,000 triangles are refused, so shell parts before combining them.
• Split: cuts a body in two by a plane, a flat face or another body; both parts stay editable.
• Separate parts: makes each loose piece of a body its own body, shown in its own colour before you press OK. A hollow inside a piece stays with it, and pieces that overlap without being joined come apart too: union them afterwards to join them properly. Each part moves, turns and scales about the middle of its base. Deleting all the parts gives the body back. Also on a body’s right-click menu, and on an imported model’s properties.
• Scale: makes a body bigger or smaller about its own middle.
• Pattern: repeats a body in a row, a grid, or round an axis, evenly or over an angle, as one body: subtract a pattern of cylinders for a ring of bolt holes. Change the body and every copy follows.
• Mirror: reflects a body across a plane, keeping the original as well (half a part made whole) or not.
• Align: lines a body up with another, or with the bed: before, at the start, centre or end of, or after it, on each axis, with a gap. On top of another body, centred on it, is two clicks.
• Lay flat: click a flat face and the body turns so that face is on the bed, as you’d turn a part for printing.
• Hole can be tapped: threaded for an ISO bolt of that diameter to screw into.

The mouse works as in most CAD:

• Left button selects. Click a body, or drag a box over empty space: from left to right it takes what’s wholly inside, from right to left also what it touches. Shift adds to the selection. Right-click a body for its menu.
• Right button turns the view, the middle button (or Shift with the right) moves it, and the wheel zooms.
• The cube in the corner turns with the view: click a face, an edge or a corner to look from there, or drag it. The house below it goes back to the starting view.

Select only picks; Move, Rotate and Scale put a gizmo on the body selected. You can also type exact values in the panel on the right. Units are millimetres, and Z is up, as on a printer’s bed.

Key	Does
Q W E R	Select, move, rotate, scale
L A R C P	In a sketch: line, arc, rectangle, circle, polygon
⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z	Undo / redo (Ctrl on Windows)
Delete	Delete what’s selected
F	Fit the view to the design
I	Measure
Esc	Drop a shape half drawn or a selection box, finish the sketch, clear the selection

While editing, the status bar along the bottom gives how many bodies there are, how big they are together and how much they hold: the selected bodies, or the whole design when nothing is selected. Its mm / cm / in switch sets the design’s units.

Measure (the ruler in the toolbar, or I) works as in other CAD: choose what to pick (points, edges, faces or bodies) and click. One pick shows its own size: a point’s position, an edge’s length, a face’s area, a body’s size and volume. A second shows the shortest distance between them, drawn as a dashed line, how far apart that is along X, Y and Z, and the angle between edges or faces; between two bodies, the gap or how much they overlap. A third click starts again. Measuring changes nothing in the design.

Check for printing (the checklist at the right of the status bar) checks each visible body where it is placed: on the bed and within it, in one piece, not overlapping another, no overhang that needs support and no wall too thin to print, for the bed size, overhang angle and thinnest wall you set. A floating body has Onto bed to put it down. Below it, Measure gives the gap or the overlap between two bodies, to check a fit or a clearance. Ask AI and an assistant over MCP run the same check on their own work. As in other CAD, a thread is judged as the plain cylinder it’s cut on, so its ridges don’t count as overhang or thin walls.

Download STL in the design’s menu saves the visible bodies as one STL for your slicer. Save to Thingport makes a model of them in your library instead: the STL, a picture of the view as you see it, and what you asked Ask AI about the design as its description. Each save is a new model, a copy of the design as it was; an AI connected over MCP, or Ask AI, can save it too when you ask.

Working with an AI assistant

Connect an assistant as the MCP guide describes, then turn on Studio designs in your API token’s MCP permissions (Profile → API token). The assistant can then list, read, make and change your designs, and look at them from any side. Ask it, say, to “make a 60 × 40 × 20 mm box with a 4 mm wall and open top in Studio” and watch the design build up on the page.

Every change, yours or the assistant’s, can be undone, and the assistant can see what you changed meanwhile.

Ask AI

The Ask AI box at the bottom of the page does the same from inside Thingport, once an admin turns on the Studio assistant and picks the AIs it offers (see AI). Describe a part, or a change to the design that’s open, and press Enter (Shift+Enter starts a new line).

• The assistant works through the same steps as the toolbar, and each one shows in the view as it lands, listed under your request while it works. Stop ends the run after the step it’s on, and Ctrl/⌘+Z takes its steps back one at a time.
• What’s selected in the view goes along with your request, so “round the top edges of this” knows what “this” is.
• Each design keeps its own conversation, so “make it taller” follows on from “make a box”. Clear it from the box’s header; the design stays as it is.
• Pictures: with an AI that sees pictures (an admin says which, in AI), the box takes up to four: the picture button, paste, or drop them on it. A photo or a drawing with sizes on it is something to build from; a logo or a silhouette the AI traces into an outline exactly, as Trace picture does. The pictures stay with the design’s conversation.
• A run takes up to 30 steps and 10 minutes. Not every model can use tools: small local models often can’t, and the box says so when one doesn’t. An admin can give a small local model the compact tool set, which covers shapes, text, tracing, moving, combining and holes.

The box stays small so you can watch the design change: while the AI works, one line says the step it’s on, and then its answer; the conversation opens from the box’s header. The view keeps the design above the box. If you’d rather read the conversation as it goes, pick Side panel under Ask AI in Studio settings (the gear at the right of the status bar, while editing): it then shows beside the view, and the box keeps only the prompt.

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