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, drawing on a face exactly as on the ground, offsetting a boundary, editing what you drew, 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 the copy modifier 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, opening and saving SketchUp files, saving in the browser vs. the desktop, and the 12-second autosave net.
- Guide 19
Import and export
Hew reads and writes SketchUp files, reads 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, how the viewport feels, how copies behave, 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.