Learn Hew
The user guide. Start with the first two chapters — the workflow and the ideas underneath it — then dip into the rest as reference for each part of the app.
- Guide 1
Getting started
Build a small desk-organizer set — tray, pen cup, scooped bin, and phone stand — in about fifteen minutes, and meet the tools you'll reach for every session.
- Guide 2
Core concepts
Why objects never fuse on contact, what watertightness buys you, and how inference snapping fits in. Start here if you know SketchUp.
- Guide 3
The Hew interface
Find your way around the window, from tool rail to status bar, including the tools that don't have a button on screen.
- Guide 4
Viewing your model
How to get around: mouse navigation, the dedicated camera tools, standard views, Zoom Extents, visibility controls, and the non-destructive Section Plane.
- Guide 5
Drawing
The five profile tools, offsetting a boundary, what changes when you draw on a face instead of the ground, and every way to type an exact dimension.
- Guide 6
Push/Pull
One gesture turns a profile into a solid, reshapes a face, or cuts a hole clean through. The heart of modeling in Hew.
- Guide 7
Follow Me
Sweep a profile along a path — pipes, moldings, frames, and lathe-like shapes from one profile and one line to follow.
- Guide 8
3D Text
Extruded, watertight lettering from any font on your machine — signs, labels, embossed and engraved text you can print.
- Guide 9
Move, Rotate, and Scale
Move, Rotate, or Scale with full snapping, axis locks, and typed values — or drag an object straight from Select. Copying is a Move with Alt tapped — and ×N multiplies it into an array.
- Guide 10
Precision, measurement, and guides
Everything about exact dimensions: display units, the typed-input grammar, the Tape Measure and Protractor, and guides.
- Guide 11
Dimensions and text
Annotate a model with dimensions that follow the geometry they measure, radius and diameter callouts, and leader text.
- Guide 12
Combining and splitting solids
Union, Subtract, Intersect, and the Slice tool. When to use each, and when Push/Pull does the job without a boolean.
- Guide 13
Groups and components
Groups bundle things that move together; components repeat one definition across many instances. Neither merges geometry.
- Guide 14
Materials
Paint faces or fill whole objects from a per-document palette of colors and textures that survives every modeling operation, and adjust opacity for glass and other see-through materials.
- Guide 15
The Library
Save components, materials, and whole models to a personal library, then insert them into any document with a click.
- Guide 16
Organizing your model
Names, tags, visibility toggles, and the Outliner keep a growing model legible and searchable.
- Guide 17
Scenes
Save named views of a model — camera, what's hidden, the section cut, and display toggles — and switch between them in one click, on the desktop or on your phone.
- Guide 18
Files, saving, and recovery
Where your work lives: the open .hew format, saving in the browser vs. the desktop, and the 12-second autosave net.
- Guide 19
Import and export
Hew reads SketchUp, COLLADA, glTF, and STL, and writes manifold STL and 3MF for printing, glTF for everything else, USDZ for AR, and true-size SVG line drawings.
- Guide 20
Printing
Print a view on paper, print a drawing to exact scale across as many sheets as it takes, or save a PDF — one dialog for all three.
- Guide 21
Hew on your phone
Shop Mode turns a phone into a touch viewer for a model you built at the desk: tap a part for its dimensions, check a cut length, work offline at the bench.
- Guide 22
Settings and diagnostics
Units and theme, the server Open on Phone uses, plus Debug Mode and a bug reporter that bundles everything a developer needs into one file.
- Guide 23
Keyboard shortcuts
Every default shortcut on one page, including the modifier keys that change what a tool does mid-gesture.