Frequently asked questions

Hew is a free, open-source 3D modeler for people who learned on SketchUp — woodworkers, builders, makers, architects. It keeps the way of working that made SketchUp so intuitive and addictive: draw on a face, push/pull it into a shape, snap to inferred points and edges as you go, mostly the same keyboard shortcuts. It runs natively on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and the same full app runs in your browser.

Underneath, Hew improves on SketchUp’s one structural weakness: every shape you pull up is a discrete, watertight solid that never welds to its neighbors by accident. Think of it as the “Select All and Make Group” reflex, built into the foundation.

Yes. Hew is licensed under the AGPL-3.0, so it is fully Open Source and free — no subscription, no account, no feature tier held back for a paid plan. The source lives at github.com/hew3d/hew. It will be possible to create proprietary plugins in the future, but Hew itself will always be completely free.

Hew intentionally feels a lot like SketchUp — the same push/pull workflow, generally the same tools, the same reliance on inference snapping, and typically the same keyboard shortcuts. An experienced SketchUp user should feel at home almost immediately.

The practical differences are cost and reach. SketchUp no longer has a free desktop app (Hew is a native desktop app on macOS, Windows, and Linux); SketchUp’s free web tier is stripped down (Hew’s web app is the full modeler); and the full SketchUp product is a subscription costing hundreds of dollars a year (Hew is free and open source).

There is also a difference underneath: SketchUp models are a soup of individual mesh faces that weld together the moment ungrouped geometry touches, and can silently go hollow if a single face or the wrong line is deleted or flipped. Hew’s Objects are watertight solids by construction, never weld to each other by accident, and only combine when you explicitly ask.

To be fair the other way: SketchUp has 25 years of professional development and a strong community behind it. Hew is just getting started and has none of that.

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.

The SketchUp native import is limited to 2017 for now since that’s the last freely available desktop app version and newer SketchUp versions should be able to save-as 2017.

Hew runs as a native app on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and as a web app at app.hew3d.com in any modern, WebGL2-capable browser. It also runs as a “PWA” on your phone, in “Shop Mode” (read-only and laser-focused on measurement). Finally, you can self-host the web app locally, from a simple nginx drop-in all the way to a full Proxmox LXC setup.

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.

Yes. Hew Objects are watertight solids by construction, so when you export an STL or 3MF the mesh is manifold — no gaps, no flipped normals, no repair step in the slicer. An operation that would open up a shell is prevented or clearly flagged, never allowed to pass silently, so you won’t discover a broken model halfway through a print.

Hew development uses Anthropic AI models extensively — mostly Claude Opus and Fable. It would simply not exist without their prolific help.

As such, AI contributions are very welcome. Just recognize that AI does not “own” any of the code: it’s always a human that needs to review the code, understand it, and stand by it. All commits must be signed off by a person, not a bot.