Frequently asked questions

Hew is a cross-platform 3D modeler that keeps SketchUp’s beloved interaction model — draw on a face, push/pull it into a shape, snap to inferred points and edges as you go — but replaces its data model with a solids-first one. Extruding a closed profile automatically creates a real, watertight Object; Objects never weld together unless you explicitly combine them. The result is a tool that feels like SketchUp but produces models that stay reliably solid.

Yes. Hew is pre-release software and free to use, and the entire project — modeling kernel included — is open source. You can find the source at github.com/hew3d/hew. There’s no paid tier, account requirement, or usage limit planned for the core modeler.

The interaction model is intentionally close to SketchUp’s — the same push/pull workflow, the same reliance on inference snapping instead of typed constraints. The difference is underneath: SketchUp models are a soup of individual faces that weld together the moment ungrouped geometry touches, and can silently become hollow if a single face is deleted or flipped. Hew’s Objects are watertight solids by construction, never weld to each other by accident, and only ever combine when you explicitly ask them to. You get the same low floor and fast feel, without the two failure modes that make large SketchUp models fragile.

Yes. Hew can import SketchUp’s native .skp format (2017-era files) via a clean-room reader, as well as COLLADA .dae files, which every version of SketchUp can export. Imported geometry is healed and classified into watertight Objects where possible, and non-manifold geometry is flagged rather than silently repaired, so you always know what you’re starting from.

That’s the point of the watertightness guarantee: Hew Objects are solid by construction, and an operation that would open up a shell is prevented or clearly flagged rather than allowed to pass silently. When you export an STL or 3MF from a solid Object, it’s manifold — no gaps, no flipped normals, no non-closed shells — which is exactly what a slicer expects. You won’t discover a broken model halfway through a print.

Today, Hew runs as a web app at app.hew3d.com in any modern, WebGL2-capable browser — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari, on macOS, Windows, or Linux. Native desktop installers for all three operating systems are in development; because the desktop build shares the same Rust-compiled-to-WebAssembly kernel and file format as the web app, they’re packaging work rather than a separate rewrite.

Hew’s native format is .hew — an open, documented format, not a black box. It’s a zip container holding a JSON manifest (document tree, materials, metadata) alongside binary geometry buffers, versioned so files stay compatible across releases. Because it’s specified openly, other tools can read and write it without reverse-engineering anything.