layerling - Free 3D CAD for 3D printing in your browser

What layerling adds

• Chamfer and fillet edges, taken back or changed at any time, on exact CAD geometry all the way into the STEP file.
• Hollow out bodies (even wall thickness) and split them with a plane, slanted too.
• Sketches with exact measurements and rounded corners that you extrude into bodies or revolve around an axis.
• Threads: screws, nuts, threaded rods and tapped holes, metric, UNC/UNF and Whitworth.
• Patterns in a row, circle or spiral, and wrapping shapes around a cylinder.
• STEP exchange with CAD programs, plus STL, 3MF, OBJ and SVG - plus measuring, a section view and a history to look back at earlier states.
• Printer profiles for around 190 printers with an overhang warning, marked overhangs and a filament estimate.
• An AI can build along on request, through the MCP interface - with a copy of layerling that you run yourself.

What else layerling does

• Hollow: bodies with an even wall, open on any sides you choose (top, bottom, front, back, left, right, also combined) or fully closed - inner edges rounded or sharp.
• Split: cut a body or a hole in two with a plane you move and tilt for an angled cut - handy for parts too big for the print bed.
• Sketches: draw outlines, curve any straight side (a double click on the body opens its sketch again), type a line's length and angle while drawing ("50<30") or snap it in 15° steps, type lines to an exact length and corners to an exact angle, fillet or chamfer corners, draw construction lines that points snap to, and extrude them or revolve them around an axis - or build just the line with a width, as a frame or a stripe.
• Shape library: threads (metric, UNC/UNF and G pipe threads), bolts and nuts, gears, ring gears and racks with involute or round teeth that mesh, springs, bent pipes, lofts from one outline to another, twisted or tilted too, capsules with one smaller end, text (including curved along an arc, in fonts of your own, Arabic and Hebrew right to left too, as an outline, a silhouette or in layers as a name tag for a multicolour print, with a key ring hole and rounded letter edges if you like; an SVG icon as a layered icon tag too), print-in-place hinges, knurled grips (straight, crossed or round), dovetail joints, teardrop holes for horizontal bores, counterbores and countersinks for screw heads and more - all adjustable afterwards. Bodies you need again and again are kept as custom shapes - in the browser or on your own server - and go into any design with one click.
• Patterns: repeat a shape n times in a row or around a circle, for hole grids or toothed rings - and scale several parts at once by a percentage.
• Hole pattern: Click a flat face of a body and spread holes over it: round, square, rectangular, hexagonal or slots, in a grid or staggered, with spacing, margin to the edge and depth (through the whole body or a set depth). A preview shows the holes before you create them; they stay ordinary holes, grouped with the body - for vents, speaker grilles, baskets and enclosures.
• Bundle: hold parts together with Ctrl+B as in Tinkercad, without merging them - colours stay and every part is its own body in the export, handy for multicolour prints. A group shows every part in its own colour too, with the Multicolor switch, even after it was merged with holes.
• Workplane on any face: place shapes straight onto slanted or side faces, and hide the plane for a clear view without dropping it.
• Place by click: a new shape follows the pointer and lands where you click - can be switched off in the settings.
• Snap to other shapes: while moving, edges and centres lock onto neighbouring shapes and a guide line shows where - Alt during the drag pauses it. Shift keeps the move on one axis, and Alt held from the start drags a copy, as in Tinkercad. New shapes lie down on the face under the pointer, sloped ones too, and C sets the selection down on another face the same way, like Cruise in Tinkercad.
• Snap grids of your own: add a measure such as the 2.54 mm pin pitch of chips and perfboard in the settings; the snap menu offers it whole, halved and quartered.
• A clear view: the object list, the settings and the tool panels can be dragged anywhere on the workplane, dragging the view cube turns the view, a click on its corners and edges shows the model at an angle, and the plate can be hidden for a look from below. A right click on a body brings up the most used commands, and the view can be saved as a picture.
• Rotation pivot: turn around the axis of a pipe end or the centre of a face instead of the body's centre. On a single body the pivot stays with it.
• Lay flat on face: click a face and the part rests on the plate with that side down - the best print orientation in one click. "Align faces" does the same between two parts: click a face of one, then a face of the other, and they touch or sit flush, with an optional gap.
• Measure: tape measure, ruler and framing square, distances to the origin - for several selected bodies too -, notes right on the workplane, and a section view that cuts the model open to look inside, measures wall thickness and gaps on the cut and saves it as an SVG for a laser or a template.
• Save into your folder: in Chrome and Edge you choose the folder and name yourself, and Ctrl+S saves the design into that file again - a file you opened is replaced in place. Other browsers download it.
• Back up all designs: one click packs every design into a single file; opening it brings them all back, in this browser or another.
• Ready to print: around 190 printers with their build plate; layerling warns when something reaches past the plate or is too tall, marks overhangs that would need supports and estimates weight and filament on export.
• Import: STL, OBJ and 3MF with their colours, STEP and SVG, plus images as a reference - and parts from other layerling designs straight into the open one. An SVG comes in as a sketch: an area, a stroke outside or inside, or a silhouette without its holes, say for a cookie cutter. An SVG pattern or lettering can be wrapped around a cylinder, raised or engraved.
• Works offline: after the first visit layerling also starts without internet - install it like a normal program, your designs stay on your computer.
• Build with AI: through the MCP interface an AI assistant can create and edit shapes, in an editor it opens itself. That needs a copy you run yourself (npm run dev, or the Docker image); on layerling.com the AI connection is off.
• Reference points: right-click a body to mark its centre, corners or edge middles with points that nothing prints and that shapes snap to - then place a hole exactly on the centre of another part.
• Command search: Press Ctrl+K and type the name of a tool, a shape or a command to jump straight to it - in English or German, with the keyboard shortcuts shown beside each one. The bodies of your design are found by name as well.
• Simplify meshes: An imported mesh with a very large number of triangles is reduced to a fraction, with a before-and-after view and a slider - so cutting, grouping and dragging stay smooth.
• History: look back at any earlier state of the project with a slider, without changing anything - export that state or start a new project from it.
• Look as you like it: Background and workplane, axis arrows for X, Y and Z, edge lines on every body, the sketch colours, and the contrast, the shadows and the direction of the light are yours to set in the settings - for example so dark bodies do not run into each other. On slower computers, fast mode turns everything costly off at once.

Install as an app or host it yourself

Installed as an app, layerling starts like a normal program, with its own icon and window, even without internet - one click in Chrome or Edge is enough. If you would rather host it yourself so nothing leaves the house: on Windows one line in PowerShell is enough, and it adds a shortcut on the desktop. For a NAS or home server there is a ready-made Docker image for amd64 and arm64; there the designs can also live on the server, so every device in the house sees the same ones. The steps are in the guide chapter on installing and hosting it yourself.