How to Use These Tools

1. Fastest start: press one of the fall studio-site buttons for a full Superfund survey — terrain, climate, water and the EPA record — with the studio brief attached.
2. Or search a place, or click the map to drop a pin; set the Radius (1,000 ft up to 5 mi) to say how much ground you are studying.
3. Reframe Region ⇄ Site and turn map layers on: terrain and hillshade, contours, soils, land cover, flood, seismic, parcels, aerial imagery.
4. Read the ground in the cards — sun path and solar gain by façade, prevailing wind by season, monthly temperature and humidity, design conditions, slope and aspect, watershed and wells.
5. For a listed site, read The EPA record in reading order, with the vocabulary panel beside it for the terms the documents use.
6. Ask about this place puts Claude on the loaded data (sign-in — it spends the API key); everything else on the page is free and needs no account.
7. Keep the spot: click the map to drop a pin exactly where you want it, then ★ Save coordinate (sign-in) files it under Your saved sites with the radius you chose and any parcel you traced — one click surveys it again later against live data, and Proving Ground's Load coordinate stands a massing on it.
8. Hand it off: .3dm or .obj kit (.zip), .dxf contours and boundary, the .epw, site metrics CSV, or the Dossier — plus one-click doors into Grade, Eco-Architect, Proving Ground, Skin and the Editor.

Cut and fill on real terrain · what the earthwork costs before anything is built

1. Search a place, take Surveyor's hand-off, or press Demo hillside — the USGS 3DEP terrain grid loads with it.
2. Draw the proposed grade on the plan: a pad at an elevation you set, or a run of benches with a tread and riser stepping up a direction you choose.
3. Set the cut and fill batters; the side slopes daylight out to existing grade and the toe and top-of-slope lines get drawn for you.
4. Read cut (bank), loose (in the truck) and compacted (in the fill) separately, plus net import/export, truckloads and the error bar — soil swells in the truck and shrinks in the fill, so these are three different numbers, not one.
5. Press ⚖ Balance (geometric) or ⚖ Balance (material) and watch the pad elevation get solved for — they are different answers, and the gap between them is the lesson.
6. Switch the soil class and watch a geometrically balanced scheme stop balancing.
7. Export the earthwork schedule CSV, the graded surface as OBJ, the toe and top-of-slope lines as DXF, and the cut/fill plate as SVG — all on Surveyor's shared origin.

Climate literacy · read an EPW weather file

1. Drop in an EPW weather file — it's parsed in your browser and never uploaded. (Surveyor hands one over for any site it surveys.)
2. Read the whole climate on one page: temperature and design values, sun path, wind rose and prevailing direction, and GHI / DNI / DHI radiation.
3. Read the passive-strategy strip — which hours are comfortable as-is, and which want natural ventilation, thermal mass and night flush, evaporative cooling, or active heating and cooling.
4. Jump to the Psychrometric Chart tool for the same climate as an 8,760-hour cloud, or open it in Skin to turn the radiation into kilowatt-hours.

Urban figure-ground tracing

1. Import a site plan image to trace — it sits underneath as a faint reference you can fade or hide.
2. Paint the built mass with the Brush, Rectangle or Polygon tools; Eraser and Undo clean up the edge.
3. Switch Diagram mode between Figure-ground and Nolli poché, and Invert to read the void as the solid.
4. Download SVG (real vectors, not a screenshot) or PNG to drop into a drawing.

1. Sign in, then create or pick a project — the library is per-project, so references don't pile into one heap.
2. Paste an image URL or upload an image you found, and add a line of context about what you're looking for.
3. No picture yet? Research a subject: name a topic ("courtyard housing in hot-dry climates") and get a brief — themes, precedents with the drawing to look for, vocabulary and readings. Found in search means its link is a page the run's own web searches returned (and that still answers) — not that the page agrees; Not matched means verify it yourself. Look it up runs a precedent through Find by name, and each precedent or reading saves into the project.
4. Look it up: the Librarian says what it sees in the image, gives possible identifications with a confidence, and tells you what it checked.
5. Read Where to find related material — plans, drawings and background — and follow through to Wikipedia and the Getty AAT vocabulary rather than stopping at the guess.
6. More engines (second opinion) runs it again a different way when the first identification looks thin.
7. Save the finds into the project — each one carries the write-up the Librarian made of it through the conversation, so a classmate opening the project later reads what you worked out, not the first guess.
8. Ask the Librarian about this, on any saved picture in the archive, reopens it up top with that conversation still going — keep asking, and Update the saved write-up puts the better answer back on your own item.

Its pages: Class References · Batch Import

you need facts you can cite — found on real pages, quote-checked, and read twice

1. Sign in, then type the question — a figure, a date, a code clause, who built what, what a material does. Add scope if it matters: a country, a date range, primary sources only, what the answer is for.
2. Set how many findings you want (3–12; fewer is faster and cheaper), leave Second reader on, and press Run. Fast is the default; Deep reads harder questions better.
3. Read the findings. Each is one statement read on one page, with a quote. The STANDING chip is computed from the checks: the link check, the server looking for the quote on the page, and the second reader's verdict — never the model's own confidence. NO SOURCE means the run could not cite a page it opened; treat it as a hunch.
4. The second reader searches independently and marks each finding confirmed (an independent page it opened says the same), source-only, contested (a page disagrees — its note says how) or unsupported. A confirmation with no page the tool can show is lowered to source-only.
5. Choose a format and press Write: a memo, an annotated bibliography, literature-review paragraphs, slide bullets, or one you describe. The model may cite only findings by number; the tool checks every number and strips any link it did not come from. A reference list (APA, Chicago, MLA), BibTeX, CSV or a table is built from the citation fields with no model call.
6. Open the pages before you cite them. Export the research report, the BibTeX or the CSV from the bar; Save keeps the whole desk in your Work.
7. What it checked, at the bottom, lists every search run and every page opened — the record of what the desk did and did not look for.

Landscape · a living drawing — three versions in one

1. Pick a version at the top: v1 Grows (the stand grows and draws itself), v2 Evolves (species traits evolve), v3 Shows uncertainty.
2. Plant the stand — pick the seed mix, the sowing density, and the site pressure (moisture, wet→dry tilt).
3. Scrub or ▶ Play the century and watch the drawing build itself; there is no wager and no reveal here, it just grows.
4. Open Species traits to author the ecology yourself, and the System tab to set how the layers act on each other.
5. Tune the layer stack — crowns, hatch, overlays — then set the sheet and export the print plate.

settle a community of gable lounges on a landscape — placement, plinths and stairs negotiated by site forces

1. Land on a site: Use Surveyor site pipes terrain, climate and the EPA record over, or set latitude and longitude by hand, or take the Demo hillside + creek.
2. Transcribe the remediation as drawn zones — Draw cap zone for ground you must not puncture, Draw clean zone for ground you may.
3. Read the ground before you place anything: toggle the winter-sun, summer-sun and slope maps to see what the site is actually offering.
4. Place lounges from the proportion seeds, then tune each one's genes and its plinth level; the roster reads back each lounge's relationship to the ground.
5. Lap plinths to link them — stairs generate where levels differ, and a joint that can't work is flagged rather than faked.
6. ▶ Negotiate to walk the whole field: weight the forces and let every free lounge settle placement and proportion at once. Freeze a phase and grow the next against what already stands.
7. Hand off: open one lounge in Eco-Architect, analyze the field in Proving Ground, or export the field as an OBJ mesh.

Its pages: Studio map

Landscape × Site · the ground paints its own planting

1. Survey a site in Surveyor first and press Sync → the ground comes across on its own; without one, Swale opens on a labelled demo hillside with a creek in it.
2. Set the plot edge in feet, then read the WATER: the ribbons are channels (their width is what drains through them) and the blue sheets are ground that ponds before it can spill.
3. Switch the wash to see what the ground handed you — habitat bands, moisture, exposure, fertility — and hover any legend row or number for the algorithm behind it.
4. Press Play and watch the stand sort itself over the decades. You cannot place a plant: change the seed mix, the sown density or the channel threshold and let the ground decide again.
5. Reseed draws a different possible future from the same ground — the model is stochastic, and one run is not a prediction.
6. Place lounges in Eco Lounges, then Re-read the lounges here: they mask the planting where they are built, and each one reports the band it stands in and the water crossing it.

Landscape history · shifting-baseline reveal on Annual NLCD

1. Start on one of the curated teaching sites, or search an address, or click the map to drop a pin anywhere in the lower 48.
2. Scrub the year slider 1985 → 2025 and watch the real Annual NLCD land cover flip class under the pin — 30 m data, not an illustration.
3. Read the trajectory panel: what this ground held then, the bucket shares year by year, and the net change since 1985.
4. Read the honest limits before you argue from it — 30 m pixels, a classification with its own error rate, and no account of what happened between two Augusts.

Landscape succession · plant a community, wager its fate

1. On The site, set the pressure — soil moisture, fertility and the wet→dry gradient — or take one of the site presets.
2. On The seed mix, stock the gene pool: sow at least two species, set the sowing density and the horizon in years.
3. Go to Reveal and the decades run — twenty futures at once, plus one representative stand you can scrub or ▶ Play year by year.
4. Read what the ground did with what you sowed: dominant species, canopy cover, closure year with its ± band, richness, and the named surprises.
5. Optional: fill in the Wager panel first — four bets about the outcome — and Grade scores them against the ensemble. It is an extra reading, never a lock; the decades run either way.
6. Send the grown community to Hatchling to draw it, and Save the trace to keep the run.

Landscape representation · a drawing that inks itself

1. Lay the ground first — soil, water distance, drought window and time — or import a Wilding mosaic to draw a stand you actually grew.
2. Author the grammar: each rule maps a ground condition (the driver) to a mark family — line hatch and cross-hatch, stipple and poché, flicks and crossed dashes, mycelium web.
3. Set the ink: line weight, ink strength, boldness, hand wobble, mark scale and tile density — this is where the drawing gets its hand.
4. Scrub or ▶ Play the years and watch the plan re-ink itself as the ground changes; the drawing becomes a diagram of process rather than a snapshot.
5. Set the sheet — page shape, margins, paper colour, typeface, captions — and export the print plate. Read it as a convention, not a truth: the marks are a drawing system, not measured data.

Tactile sound in the landscape · tune an installation to what a body can feel

1. Start on The Band: see where streams, rain, wind and birdsong sit against what skin can actually feel — click a source and pick a target (at pitch, transposed down in octaves, or its rhythm).
2. On Listen, record about six seconds of the real source on site (or upload a field recording); the page finds its spectral peaks and its rhythm in your browser.
3. On Tune, pick an element — reed, rod, plank, rail, cable or membrane — and a material; read its first three modes, then Solve to size the length to your target. Watch what a resting hand does to the pitch.
4. ▶ Pluck it to hear the design's own voice — its real inharmonic modes decaying at its damping — and play a Listen recording through the tuned element to preview what it would pass to the skin.
5. Build it, then on Verify wire an MPU-6050 to an Arduino (four wires), upload the one-file sketch, connect over Web Serial, pluck the element, and read measured frequency and damping against your design; the pluck log averages repeated takes.
6. Back on Tune, Calibrate from the pluck — the measurement back-solves the effective stiffness or tension, so the numbers predict your build rather than the handbook.
7. No hardware yet? Demo capture runs the whole analysis path. No Web Serial? Upload the same CSV any serial monitor logs. The Field panel tunes a whole array to a scale and exports the cut sheet.

play the design forward through the brief's century

1. Open it and scrub — it runs Eco-Architect's default pavilion as a worked example straight away. Sign in and pick a Work with a saved Eco-Architect design version to project your own building instead.
2. Scrub 2026 → 2126 one year at a time; both lanes show their value for the scrubbed year, and the carbon ledger underneath breaks the total into the embodied spike, the replacements so far, and the operations so far.
3. Find the crossover year — where everything since handover has equalled the up-front embodied carbon. It is the number the whole century argument turns on.
4. Now drive the assumptions and watch the curves move: conditioned hours and mean draw, how clean the grid gets and by when, and how long the glazing and roof last before they are re-bought whole. Set the grid to 100% of today, or the service lives to zero, to see exactly what those two silent assumptions were worth.
5. Watch where solid turns to dashed — solid is inside the data horizon, dashed is extrapolation. Past 2050 the climate lane has no local model at all: one global AR6 ratio stretches the 2050 pattern, and the Misses line says what that cannot see.

drive CAD by language and touch, not the screen

1. Start in the Studio — the model is authored as text and read back in every channel at once: plan, 3D, spoken description, Braille and a state tree. No sign-in needed for the Console, Forms, every view and every export.
2. Load starter → Empty to begin, or Sample model to read a finished one first. Add geometry with the Assistant in plain language ("add a 36 by 20 floor plate on a new slab layer") or key the same moves yourself in the Console. The Assistant spends the studio's API budget, so it sits behind a password.
3. Switch the Assistant between Change (it edits the model) and Ask (it answers from the model and can never edit) — Ask measures area, distance, clearance and counts, and runs a spoken audit against cited ADA and IBC minimums, saying plainly what plan geometry cannot prove.
4. Soundwalk walks the plan on foot: arrow keys move you three feet a stride, every step is spoken, walls block and doors pass, with optional footstep and wall-proximity audio — and a live marker so a sighted classmate follows the identical walk.
5. Undo / Redo step through the whole history, Speak confirmations announces every change aloud, and the level selector views and exports one floor at a time. The 3D view is a sighted aid only and is hidden from screen readers.
6. Export state.json (re-openable, yours or a classmate's), PIAF PNG for tactile printing, STL for a 3D print, and the command log — all matching what's on screen.
7. Then the other channels: Tactile Drawings turns a model into swell-paper plans, sections and axons with real lineweights — or, when the PIAF is down, into the same low-relief STL; Pegboard prints a jig for building wire models by touch — holes every 1/8 or 1/4 in on a square grid, a polar grid or both, Braille rulers on two edges, wire channels between the holes; Tactile Image turns a photograph into a tactile plate — and, when the PIAF is down, into a low-relief STL for the 3D printer, a few layers thick and watertight; Image Cleaner rescues a rough phone photo or scan into clean black-on-white before it goes to press; Dither Camera turns a live camera feed into a high-contrast dither or halftone, freeze a frame for PIAF; Alt Text writes and audits image descriptions (sign-in — it spends an AI call); Quick Describe is Alt Text's one-thumb phone shutter — point the camera, one tap, hear what it is.

Its pages: Studio · Tactile Drawings · Portraitist · Pegboard · Tactile Image · Sound Relief · Acoustician · Image Cleaner · Dither Camera · Texture Compiler · Alt Text · Quick Describe · Print

trade sun against wind, mass and comfort — the whole building at once

1. Pick a version at the top — the shell keeps every generation live, and the newest is not always the one you want.
2. Shape the gable with the site-force sliders — room width and length, ridge height, rise and shift, roof pitch left and right, overhangs, north rotation.
3. Set the location and load a real .epw, and the metrics answer live: passive comfort hours, overheating ratio, HVAC hours, glazing ratio, embodied carbon and envelope area.
4. Write rules under My rules — a rule is a claim you can check, like a floor area to hold or a comfort floor — and read Shortfall against them rather than a vibe.
5. In V6/V7/V8/V9, set the buildability rules first so the search can't hand you a shape nobody could build.
6. V7 Compare runs several approaches at once, then reads the trade-offs, the robust picks and a written comparison; send them all to the V5 Lineup to see each design scored by every approach.
7. V8 Ground Truth stands the gable on one of the five studio Superfund sites — or a Surveyor survey opened whole — and walks it on the real landform: flip Today ⇄ 2050, read the design on all five grounds at once, and ⚑ record each adopted design into the exportable trajectory.
8. V9 Parallax walks one brief on five real grounds simultaneously — read what every landform agrees on, ✦ cross-read the champions across grounds, then send the winning ground to V8 to refine with climate and eras.
9. Export the Rhino .3dm, save the design and rules as JSON, or hand off to Draughts, Proving Ground or Daylighter.

describe or command geometry into being

1. Sign in, then pick a version: V1 takes a form described in plain language, V2 takes keyed Rhino-style commands.
2. Describe the form, or Start from an example. Conjure writes a build() program and exposes the sliders it thinks matter.
3. Tune those sliders and watch the model rebuild; View generated code to read exactly what it wrote — the JavaScript and the Rhino Python are the same model.
4. Set Goals and Run optimizer over the sliders you choose to vary, to explore the trade-offs rather than guess at them.
5. Export a real Rhino .3dm (or the .py to run with RunPythonScript), and hand the design on with Analyze in Proving Ground or Explore in Swarm.

test any massing — even forms the gable can't make — against sun, wind, air, views and earth

1. THIS LIST IS FOR V7 — Four rectangles, the version ARCH 273 uses (the header reads “V7 · Four rectangles”). Bookmark toolkit.allmeans.works/tools-3d/crucible#v7: the plain address opens V7 too. Everything runs in your browser; sign in only to Save, to load a saved coordinate, or to brainstorm goals with Claude.
2. WHERE THINGS ARE.LEFT RAIL · the inputs: The massing · Openings · The ground · Sun · Air · Mass · View · Energy.UNDER THE MODEL · Saved views · Date + time · Viewport display (what is drawn on the model) · the Water and Daylight boxes · your studies · Verdicts · then the pills Sun · Air · Mass · View · Shadows · Year · Climate · Earth · Balance, each opening one drawing.RIGHT COLUMN · the numbers, in four tabs: Site forces · Energy & carbon · Readout · Goals.Each analysis below says where to SET it, SEE it and READ it.
3. MOVE AROUND THE MODEL. Left-drag turns it about the CENTRE OF THE MODEL, so it stays in frame however you have panned. Right-drag (or Shift + drag) pans; the wheel zooms toward the cursor.To turn about one spot instead — a corner, the focus — double-click it, or press “⊕ Orbit: model” and click once. A ⊕ marks the point; press the button again to go back to the model's centre.Bottom right of the model: 3D · Plan · N · E · S · W, “Recenter the view” (fills the frame again), and Parallel / Persp. In perspective, “2-pt” keeps vertical lines vertical and parallel — a two-point perspective: tip the view up or down and the picture slides instead of the walls leaning.“⟳ Turntable”, just left of Parallel, turns the view round the model on its own — once every 24 seconds, about the same point a drag turns about (the model's centre, or your ⊕), at the height and lens you left it. Drag up or down while it turns to set the height; press it again to stop. (For a video file of the turn: Export → Turntable animation.)“Walk at eye level” (bottom right, beside ⌨ W A S D) stands you IN the model at a person's eye height, 5′-6″ (set it on Eye height): ↑ ↓ or W S walk at 3 mph, ← → turn, A D step aside, drag to look round, click a spot to walk there, Shift to jog. You step up onto low plinths and floors and walk under roofs; Walls stops you at a wall — switch it off to walk into a massing block. Escape, ✕ Leave or any view button gives the camera back to the orbit.
4. SET THE SITE FIRST — it changes every answer. Until you do, the site is a placeholder (flat ground at 42° N, made-up weather) and the verdicts say so.The ground → “Where it stands — your coordinate or a studio site”: press a studio site (Tar Creek, Butte, Onondaga Lake, Colorado Smelter, Palmerton), pick “Load coordinate — saved in the Surveyor” (a pin you kept with ★ Save coordinate there; signed in), or paste a latitude, longitude and press Go.Or in the Sun box: search a place, or “Or drop a weather file (.epw)”.Your own ground from Rhino (say a piece you trimmed from a Surveyor export): The ground → “Where the ground comes from — two ways” → “⤓ Import ground from Rhino”. The location still sets the sun and the weather, so set it too. A model built ON its ground imports whole with “Use it as the site’s landform, instead of the location’s” ticked.A place brings a year of weather (2023 from ERA5 — a weather model, not a station at your site) and, in the US, measured ground (USGS 3DEP).“Show more ground” — The ground → “Ground extent”: pick a wider square (200 ft up to ½ mi; it opens on ¼ mi) and the landform is fetched again around the site. A ground from Rhino is the size your file covers: trim a bigger piece in Rhino and import it again.
5. SHAPE IT. The sliders under The massing are the 4 Rectangles jig, in feet: plinth, room and roof on three chained points, and the FOCUS at point 4 (“Point 4 · u” and “Point 4 · v” place it; “Focus · z (up = table, down = pit)” makes it a table or a pit). The numbers update as you drag.V7 lets the ridge govern: if a low, steep roof breaks the game, “⚠ The roof breaks the game” on the model says what, in feet. Set “Ridge governs (eave may break the rules)” (right after the Ridge end sliders) to 0 to prevent it.Turn the building with “Rotate the building” (in The ground); north stays north.Working in Rhino? “⤓ Import your Rhino model” — the manual (linked below) says how to prepare the file.
6. READ THE VERDICTS FIRST. The Verdicts box under the model has one card per force, worst first:▲ warning — working against your design; start here · ● note — worth a look · ✓ good — working, on this tool's method.Hover or tab to a card for Why, “Try this” and what it leaves out. Click it to open that force's drawing (Energy and Carbon open the Energy & carbon tab). Then go one force at a time:
7. SUN — solar gain and shading.SET · the site, “Rotate the building”, the openings and the overhangs.SEE · Viewport display → Solar (on from the start) paints the sun on the walls, roof and ground; “Field” → “the whole year” for the annual picture. Date + time picks the day and hour; In the model → “Sun paths” draws the sun's arcs.READ · the Sun pill: the gain opening by opening. Site forces → Solar gain: “Winter sun kept”, “Summer sun cut”, and the openings that earn the most winter sun and take the most summer sun.TRY AN OVERHANG · Sun box → pick a dial in “Sweep a dial” (say “Overhang south”) and press “Sweep it — winter kept vs summer cut”: the Sun drawing plots the trade as a curve, the best value ringed (jig only).MORE · the Shadows pill (plan shadows at the solstices and the equinox); The year → “Sun calendar at” an opening, drawn on the Year pill — every day of the year, in sun or shade.NOTE · the numbers use fixed suns (Dec 21, the equinox, Jun 21; 8 am–4 pm). Date + time moves the drawing only, and a west window's evening sun is under-counted.
8. WIND AND AIR — ventilation.SET · Air box → “Prevailing wind from”, “Wind speed” (a site fills both), “Shelter”, and “Inside − outside ΔT” (the warmth that drives the stack). With weather, “Aim the dial at the hours that matter” sets the wind to the hot hours', the open-window hours' or the whole year's in one press.SET THE OPENINGS · Openings box → each one “Glazed — a pane” or “Open — no glass”, and how far it “opens as” (casement, sliding, fixed…). Only the part that opens moves air.SEE · Viewport display → tick Air: the wind round the building and through the room as moving lines. The readout under the model opens with “Read the drawing” — each mark (the dashes, their colour, the rings on the openings, the wind arrow) with the number it measures and what it means here; hover a row to light its mark. It draws “Potential flow” — instant; read the path, not the evenness. For a real simulation set “Solver” (Viewport display → Air — solve) to “CFD (lattice Boltzmann)” and press “Run CFD” (15 seconds to a few minutes, in your browser; wind only, no stack).READ · the Air pill: each opening windward or leeward, stack in or out, and a rose of all 16 wind directions. Site forces → Ventilation: “Air changes per hour”, “Cross (wind)”, “Stack (buoyancy)”, and “Effective open area (cross)” — the SMALLER opening governs, so enlarge that one. With weather, “Works across the year”.NOTE · to start, the drawn air uses the wind and ΔT dials, not the date — the next step switches it.
9. THE AIR AT THE DATE — winter is not summer.SET · Air box → “The drawn air follows” starts on “The dials below”; pick “The date + hour” and the drawn air, its readout and the wind arrow read the weather year at the Date + time day and hour — that season's outside air and wind, with the room held at ASHRAE 55's comfort temperature (heated to 68 °F in a cold month).SEE · January draws a strong stack; a hot afternoon, outside warmer than the room, runs it backwards (in high, out low). The readout's wind row offers a January morning and a July afternoon in one press each.NOTE · every score and verdict stays on the dials, so looking at December never changes a summer number.
10. THERMAL — heat, mass and comfort.SET · Energy box → “Winter day (season average)”, “Summer day (season average)” (a site sets both), “Internal gains”. Mass box → “Material”, “Day–night outdoor swing”.READ HEAT · the Energy & carbon tab → The energy balance: a typical winter day, heat lost against sun and people gained (“Heating still needed”, “Sun pays back”), and a summer day with no cooling (how far the room floats above outside). With weather: “Held comfortable passively”.READ MASS · the Mass pill draws the 24-hour swing outside and in. Site forces → Thermal mass: “Mass actually working” (only a slab's first few inches work on a daily cycle), “Decrement factor” (the share of the outdoor swing that gets in; smaller is steadier), “Time lag”. A table adds mass, a pit removes it.READ CLIMATE · with a weather file, the Climate pill and Site forces → The climate: the hours the place is cold, comfortable or hot on its own, and “Hours left to HVAC” with this design.NOTE · the heat balance assumes its own concrete slab; “Material” changes the Mass readings only.
11. DAYLIGHT — how much of the sky reaches the floor.SET · the openings (glazed or open, their size and height) and the roof and overhangs. No site or weather is needed: it is an overcast sky, the same in every direction.SEE · Viewport display → tick “Daylight”: every 2 ft square of the floor, at a 30 in desk height, coloured by its daylight factor. The roof hides the floor, so cut a section: Viewport display → the section → “Z (plan)”.READ · the “Daylight factor · workplane 30 in” key: under 2 % reads gloomy, 2 % adequately daylit, 5 % well daylit, far above 5 % brings glare and summer heat. The Daylight box under the model: the mean, the dimmest spot, and how much of the floor is at 2 % and 5 % or more.NOTE · the daylight FACTOR only — one overcast moment, not a year. For sDA, ASE and glare, Sync → Analyze in Daylighter.
12. VIEW.SET · View box → “View target” (where you want to look) and “Eye height above the floor”.SEE · In the model → View draws the view arrow on the model.READ · the View pill: where the glass looks, with the view and the winter sun on one dial. Site forces → View orientation: “Floor that shares the view”.
13. GROUND AND WATER — once a place is loaded.SET · “Seat the landform” trades cut against fill; drag the box on the key map to try the ground nearby (“Back to anchor” returns).SEE · In the model → Water.READ · the Earth pill: contours, where the water runs, and a site section with cut and fill. Site forces → The ground: slope, the pad's cut and fill, catchment, standing water. The landform also shades every sun number.
14. RAIN — where a storm's water goes.SET · the Water box under the model → “Design storm” and “Soil group” (A drains fast, D hardly at all). A loaded site gives the real landform; without one the ground is flat.SEE · Viewport display → tick “Water”: the roof sheds at its drip line, the plinth and walls turn the flow, and the paint shows where water runs and stands; the flow lines trace the channels.READ · the Water box: gallons of rain and runoff for the storm, the roof's water and the rain garden that would hold its first inch, the water held in hollows, where it leaves the site, and a swale sized for the peak.NOTE · one storm's volume routed once — no timing, no gutters or pipes, no soaking in after the storm.
15. CARBON. The Energy & carbon tab → “Carbon · wind load · earth · form”: the carbon of making the materials you drew (A1–A3, ICE v4.0 factors), in kgCO₂e — a bigger plinth or a taller table shows here. Not counted: foundations, services, transport, anything after construction.
16. THE FOCUS. Site forces → “The fourth rectangle — the focus”: its area, the mass it adds or removes, the winter and summer sun on it, and the view from a seat at it. It has no verdict card; to push it, Goals → “Warm the focus” or “Shade the focus”.
17. HOW FAR TO TRUST A NUMBER. Hover or tab to any number for its method and data source. Site forces → “What each reading is good for”: each force's tier (Standard method, Screening estimate, Classroom proxy) and the professional tool to switch to. Readout → “Show methods” prints every method. The rule: trust the comparison between schemes, not the absolute number.
18. COMPARE ONE MOVE AT A TIME. Saved views → “Add view”, then “Hold”, so every option is drawn from the same camera. “Save this study” (above the model), change ONE thing, and read “What just changed” (top of Site forces): what got BETTER or WORSE. “◀ Prev study” / “Next study ▶” flip between studies; “Compare against” measures from any of them. Studies stay in this browser only.
19. GOALS — optional. Goals → “Forces — draft a goal from the form” turns a move (“Admit winter sun”, “Cut the heating”…) into a live target; “Improve toward goals” searches the sliders to meet them (jig only); “Brainstorm goals with Claude” (signed in) turns a sentence into goals.
20. TAKE IT OUT. Export (top right): “Viewport PNG” at a real scale, the sun study and animations, “Rhino .3dm (the massing)” as surfaces or mesh, a “Watertight STL”, and the numbers (“Openings CSV”, “Year CSV”, “Site-forces JSON”). “⤓ SVG” / ⤓ PNG beside the pills export the open drawing. Make the board in InDesign — V7 plots no sheet. Sync sends the design on, e.g. to Daylighter (daylight), Acoustician (sound) or Stick (framing). Save (signed in) keeps it in your Work. The V7 manual, linked below, explains every number.

Full manual: The V7 manual — preparing and importing a Rhino model, reading the verdicts, calibrating, and every number explained

copy one tested lounge nine times across real ground and try organizations — grid, cluster, contour, chain — held by an ordering grid

1. Pick the version on the strip under the header: V1 Arrange (arrange the village and read the site) or V2 Living ground (the same, with a planting grown on it many times over, on the village's water, sun and wind — set it under Planting in the rail; turn on Air for the wind to reach it).
2. Pick the study to copy: your own Proving Ground studies appear first (Save study in V7 on this browser), then the starters — the V7 4 Rectangles default is loaded. Press Load.
3. Or bring a lounge straight from Rhino: open Import a lounge from Rhino under the picker, drop the .3dm (or .obj / .stl / .ply / .glb), set the plinth's layer to floor / plinth — the lounge is copied by its plinth — check the size in feet, and press Use this lounge. It stays in Start from under Imported from Rhino on this browser; it carries the geometry only, not Proving Ground's sun, air and view readings.
4. Pick the ground: Tar Creek's chat piles at Cardin are loaded; any of the five studio sites can be, and Shift east / north walks the box to the pile you want. The terrain is fetched, not drawn — if the tiles don't answer you get a labelled stand-in pile.
5. Cycle the organizations: the Organization list (the generators first, then every sheet's nine), ◀ Previous / Next ▶, Cycle to flip through them on a timer, or All organizations to see every one on your ground at once and press the one to work on.
6. Load one from the sheets: the "Nine ways to arrange" sheets are below these steps — open any full size, pick an organization under it and press Load. A sheet organization comes in exactly as drawn; As drawn on sheet n sets Rotation to 0° and lays the drawing's hilltop on this pile's summit.
7. Break the symmetry: Rotation turns the whole organization, Drift nudges and turns each lounge (New seed for another version), Centre on the summit puts the organization's centre on the crown — or drag the red ⊕ in the plan.
8. Place by hand: click a lounge (in plan or 3D) and use its gumball, as in Rhino: drag an arrow to move it along its width or depth, a square to stretch it (Shift: both ways), the arc to turn it (Shift: 15° steps). Dragging the lounge itself moves it freely. The Lounge panel in the rail gives typed Turn, Width and Depth, and Put back; from the keyboard, Tab to a lounge: arrows move 5 ft, [ and ] turn 15°, + and − scale 5%. A hand-placed lounge keeps its place in that organization.
9. Hold it together: Ordering grid → Grid or Staggered grid, set its angle and bays in feet, and raise Snap — 100% puts every lounge on its own node, less leaves a negotiation (the red dashes are the pull). Free of the grid releases one lounge.
10. Turn and seat: Turn each lounge by the organization, the grid, the contour, the fall line or exactly as tested in Proving Ground; Seat each plinth lifted, balanced or bedded — and read the fall, cut and fill, gaps and the turn from as-tested in the right column.
11. Walk it: in the 3D view press Walk at eye level (bottom right, beside Recenter the view) to stand in the village at a person's eye height, 5′-6″ (set it on Eye height). ↑ ↓ or W S walk at 3 mph, ← → turn, A D step aside, drag to look round, click a spot to walk there, Shift to jog. You stay on the proposed ground, step up onto low plinths and walk under roofs; Walls stops you at a lounge — switch it off to walk inside one. Escape, ✕ Leave or a view button gives the camera back to the orbit.
12. Save a study, as in Proving Ground: Save this study (top of the rail, or Save, top right — the same thing) keeps the whole arrangement with its view and 3D look in the Studies box on this browser. Press a study's picture to load it, or walk them with ◀ Prev / Next ▶; rename it on its card, move it with ← →, drop it with ✕, and add a note on why under the strip.
13. Write your own rule: under Your rule, type your organizing principle as rules ("groups of three on the gentle ground, each facing the summit") and press Write the rule (signed in — it spends the AI budget). The AI writes it as a program, numbered rule by rule; it runs in your browser and becomes the organization Your rule. Read it, change it, Run my edit; a rule re-runs on any count, Module, Seed and ground. No account? Start from an example.
14. Export the village on its ground to Rhino (surfaces or mesh, on Proving Ground's layer groups), a watertight STL of the lounges, the plan as SVG, the readings as CSV, or the nine-plate sun study of the 3D view (first in the Export menu, where Proving Ground keeps it).

generate a hundred variants and see exactly what your taste costs

1. Bring a model to vary: Explore in Swarm → from Proving Ground or Conjure, or Load the built-in gable demo.
2. Tick the sliders you'll let vary, pick 2–6 KPIs, and choose the mode — sample the space (a catalogue: levels per gene) or search it (NSGA-II: population and generations).
3. Run it. Sample mode is a catalogue, not a search, and the page says so — don't read a grid as an optimization.
4. Brush the parallel-coordinates axes to narrow the cloud, sort by any score, and click a line to rebuild that exact variant in 3D.
5. Read the trade-off surface and the Pareto front — then Evolve from here if the interesting region turns out to be somewhere you didn't sample.
6. Export the variant table CSV, or Send selected variant to Scoreboard as a column. Re-run with a new seed to check the result isn't an artefact of one random draw.

After David Stasiuk's Cocoon for Grasshopper

1. Place point charges and draw polyline charges, each with its own strength and radius — or Import model (.obj/.stl/.3dm/.ply/.glb) or an SVG drawing to wrap something you already have.
2. Drag any charge or vertex; toggle Quad for Rhino-style Top / Front / Right views that pin a drag to that view's plane.
3. Set the iso value to fuse or shrink the skin, use a negative strength to carve holes, and insert or delete polyline vertices to steer the surface.
4. Array, Scatter, Radial and Symmetry build the field faster than placing charges one at a time.
5. Refine (or High-quality solve) puts the mesh properly onto the surface, then export mesh .obj / .stl / native Rhino .3dm, or save the setup JSON.
6. Add a base plate and print the SVG as a tactile drawing.

Proportion study (V1) · a whole barn project on Proving Ground V7 (V2)

1. Set the envelope — length, width, wall height — and add a second floor if you want one. Everything is in feet and inches.
2. Pick the plan shape, including the Round roof family with its central silo, and the ventilator cupola.
3. Choose the roof drive mode: drive the ridge (height and offset from centre) and read the slopes back, or drive the two slopes and read the ridge.
4. Dial bay, truss and joist spacing plus the four overhangs; add windows and skylights.
5. Read the live takeoff — areas, volume, framing lineal feet, and 4×8 sheet counts with the waste per surface.
6. Hand it on: Take it apart in Parts, Analyze in Proving Ground, Hear it in Acoustician (the round barn sends its stable or its mow as real faceted geometry, roof included), or Open in Conjure / Eco-Architect.
7. V2 (the pill at the top): design the barn on Proving Ground V7's bench — its sliders are the jig's dimensions, doors included — and read the Barn lens beside the forces.
8. Greenhouse (V2): a new project opens half greenhouse, half barn. Set the glazed bays, the end, the knee wall, the ridge vents and the partition (its door open lets the Air layer draw both halves), then pick the glazing, a night curtain, the setpoint (30 °F to start), the vent and fan setpoints and the fuel, and read what it takes to hold that all winter: heat, fuel and dollars, what the curtain saves, the heater to size, how cold it gets with no heat, month by month and the coldest week hour by hour. Load your place on the Design bench first — otherwise it runs on Chicago's typical year and says so.
9. Structure: enter the ground snow and wind speed for the address (the ATC Hazards tool), pick the lumber and the member sizes, and read every member's ratio with its arithmetic. Fix one at a time, or Size it for me; download the pre-check report for the engineer.
10. Drawings: pick a sheet, Add a note and click where it goes, add a leader to what it points at; download a sheet or the whole set as DXF (inches, full size, layered), SVG or a PDF set.
11. Estimate: every line linked to the takeoff or typed, with waste, material and labour prices, packages and markups; replace the ballpark prices with your suppliers'.
12. Bid packages: issue a package (it freezes as Rev A), download the RFQ zip — PDF, bid form as .xlsx and .csv, drawings, DXF — and send it. Quotes: import each returned bid form, and read them leveled against the estimate and each other; award one and the budget carries it.
13. The Foreman (the button in the project strip, any workspace): say what to change in plain language — “make it 48 by 30 with a 12 foot wall”, “steeper roof, 8 in 12”, “stick-frame it on 2 by 6 studs at 16”, “contingency 15 percent” — and read the proposal: each field now → proposed, held to the jig's range where it had to be, and the engine's own before → after (estimate, floor area, members failing). Apply it, or discard; Undo puts it back. Ask mode answers about the barn as it stands. Signed in; spends the AI budget.
14. Your own Rhino version: export the barn from the bench as a .3dm first (it writes the nine layers — Roof, Walls, Plinth, Focus, Glazing, Ground, Shade, Structure, Notations), model inside those layers, draw every opening as a flat surface on Glazing (a hole cut in a wall is not an opening; an open doorway goes on a Glazing sub-layer ending in “(open)”), and drop the file on the bench. The Barn lens carries the full contract under “Bring your own Rhino model”. The takeoff, pre-check and drawings stay parametric — Fit the barn to this model sets the sliders to your model's extent.

Forces in structure

1. Pick a truss type — parallel chords, Pratt, Howe, Warren, gable, bowstring, lenticular, fish-belly — or drag a Custom truss chord shape and web pattern.
2. Set the span, depth, panel count and member size; Array into a bay or switch to Space-frame for a double-layer grid.
3. Turn on Forces: compression blue, tension red, with the magnitude on every member. Slide the single point load along the truss and watch which members reverse sign.
4. Add the wind load case and read the buckling watch on members in compression.
5. Read the determinacy count — whether the truss is statically determinate, a mechanism, or redundant — and the deflected shape (exaggerated so you can see it).
6. Import a Relax net (.json) to size a form you found, and export OBJ or the forces as CSV.

Karamba-style frame analysis — real sections, real forces, real millimetres

1. Pick one of 16 structures — simply-supported beam, portal and gable frames, Pratt / Howe / Warren / bowstring / king-post / scissor trusses, Vierendeel, arch, multi-storey frame — and shape it with the parameter sliders.
2. Or start from a blank canvas and draw your own with the edit tools, or import an OBJ line model or a Relax net.
3. Give each member group a material (Steel S235/S355, Timber C24, Glulam GL24h, Aluminium) and a catalog cross-section; self-weight then follows the sections you picked.
4. Set the loads — point, deck and lateral — and analyze.
5. Read the views: utilization, axial N, moment M, shear V, and the deflected shape with peak-value labels and the worst utilization called out.
6. If it can't stand, the mechanism advisor draws the loose motion and offers one-click fixes — add a member, a support, or a rigid joint.
7. Size the sections walks every group to the lightest adequate section at your target utilization; export the schedule as CSV, centrelines as OBJ, or the model as JSON. It's a linear-elastic first-order model, not a code check.

the plan is a circle and the plates have to work as hoops

1. Pick the roof — self-supporting gambrel (Fraser's Fig. 19), a conical single slope, or a bent gothic rib — then set the diameter, the cow-storey wall, and how many ribs the roof is cut into.
2. Lay out the plan from the centre out: silo, manger, cow platform, gutter, litter alley. The feed alley is the leftover ring, so the plan always closes, and the cows are counted round the rear of the platform at 3'-6" each.
3. Load it: snow on the plan, roof dead load on the slope, and hay filling the mow to your depth or to the roof line above it, whichever comes first.
4. Read the ring table — which plate is in tension, which curb is in compression, and how far each one moves — then flip the deck-hoop switch and watch the curb's force collapse as the roof boards take over.
5. Check the buckling table: it measures whole sticks, not the segments they're solved in, and the sheathing-hoop slider is what stands a 20-foot 2×6 up. Wind it out to see the bare frame.
6. Size every stick walks each group to the lightest adequate lumber; read the takeoff and the bill in 1910 money beside it.
7. Export the schedule as CSV or the whole revolved barn as OBJ, and Analyze in Proving Ground to put the barn on a real site.

find out what a massing costs in sticks, and where it needs a beam

1. Coming from Proving Ground? Run its Sync → “Frame it in Stick” and the study’s own massing arrives here as the mass, with a banner listing every simplification it had to make. Your framing settings are untouched — they just apply to the building that landed.
2. Otherwise start from a mass preset — Two boxes, Box + silo, Box − courtyard, Stacked setback, L in plan, Two boxes one turned, Round barn — or build your own: + Box / + Cylinder, then set each solid's boolean (union, subtract, intersect), size, position, base elevation and rotation. A cylinder's FACETS are the framing decision: a curved stud wall really is that many straight walls.
3. Pick the TECTONIC SYSTEM at the top of the rail — platform framing (the default), balloon framing with continuous studs and a ribbon at every floor, a heavy timber frame of bents and mitred knee braces, CLT panels, cast-in-place concrete, or CMU blocks coursed one by one — and the rail swaps to that system's own parameters while the takeoff adds its own rows (yards of concrete and formwork, a block and mortar count, a panel schedule).
4. Set the storeys. Leave it on “As many as fit” and the count follows the lumber — floor to floor is the plates plus the stud plus the platform over it — or pin a number. Pick slab on grade, a framed floor, or a crawl space.
5. Frame the walls: stud size and spacing, the pre-cut wall height (or a stud length you type), how many top and bottom plates, the corner detail, and whether the volume's face is the outside of the sheathing, the outside of the studs, or the wall centreline.
6. Cut the openings: window width, height, sill and target spacing, door size and how many per storey, how far to stay clear of a corner. The header is sized off the opening unless you pin one, and you set the kings, the jacks, the cripples and the doubled sill.
7. Watch the floor. Joists run the short way by default and are clipped to the plan; when the run beats what that joist can carry at that spacing, a GIRDER and its posts appear — drag the building wider and watch it happen. Live load, species and grade are all sliders, and the span table is an IRC-shaped rule of thumb, not a code check.
8. Roof it — gable, shed, flat or none — with the pitch, the ridge direction, overhang, ceiling joists, collar ties and gable studs. The pitched roof is a simple gable over the plan's bounding box; hips and valleys are not framed, and the readout says so.
9. Read the takeoff: pieces, board feet, lineal feet, sheets, weight and material cost at the prices you set, plus what the framing is telling you — an over-span, a wall too tall for its stud, a header that won't fit under the plate.
10. Export the OBJ (inches, one box per member, named by kind and length), the cut list and the takeoff as CSV, a true-scale SVG framing plan of the storey you're showing, and the design as JSON.

Form-finding — a goal-deck Kangaroo analog: 24 goals, 10 presets

1. Pick a starting geometry — grid net, cable net, chain, disc, scatter, tube — and set its size and resolution. Or load one of the presets (saved goal stacks).
2. Build the force system from the deck of 24 goals: pick each goal's selection (points, edges, faces, anchors), then its strength.
3. Run the solver (Space) and let it settle; Solver quality sets the rounds, and Quasi-static removes the bounce so you read equilibrium rather than motion.
4. Colour edges by stress to see where the force actually goes, and Invert view — compression twin (hang) to read the hanging model as the arch it implies.
5. Import a mesh to use as a target and Show target mesh (ghost) to relax onto it.
6. Export the settled OBJ (Flip to arch on send inverts it for Hooke), or Send to Truss → to size members. Scope: form-finding only — this is not a sized structural design.

price your favourite curve — in unique parts, or in moulds

1. Pick a built-in surface — saddle, dome, torus patch, twisted tower, freeform roof, or the developable cone as the control — or import a quad mesh (OBJ, Relax's OBJ, or a Rhino .3dm mesh).
2. Set the tolerances, all visible and all arguable: planarity ratio (1/50 loose, 1/100 default, 1/200 tight for glass), the cold-bend warp limit, mould tolerance, and whether a mirrored panel counts as the same mould.
3. Choose how to rationalize: Force it flat counts unique panel types; Let it curve counts unique moulds. Both prices stay on screen at once — they are two different buildings, never a sum.
4. Read the unique part count with the cluster histogram, the FLAT / COLD-BEND / HOT-BENT split, and the residual-planarity report that says how far the 'flat' panels really are from flat.
5. Switch the view to Panel family to see the cost ladder as a map — which panels are flat, which take one radius, which need a mould, which are bespoke.
6. Drag the repetition slider and watch the surface visibly deviate as the part count falls. That trade is the whole tool.
7. Export the panel schedule and mould schedule as CSV and the nested cut sheets as SVG at true size. The count is an upper bound and a teaching knob — never a quote. Ask the coach to argue your move needs sign-in.

count what you actually have to build, and draw it coming apart

1. Start with the round-barn demo, take Barn Jig's Take it apart → hand-off (its dimensions arrive live), or open your own model — .3dm, .obj, .stl, .ply, .glb. The file is read in your browser and never uploaded.
2. For an imported model, say what counts as a part: CONNECTED PIECES splits a joined mesh into its members, ONE PER OBJECT trusts the file, ONE PER LAYER reads the assembly coarsely. Nudge the weld tolerance if a piece splits, or two pieces come in fused.
3. Drag the STAGE slider from assembled → exploded → laid flat, and pick which way it comes apart — outward in plan is the one for a round building.
4. Read the count: how many pieces, and how many DRAWINGS — pieces genuinely different from each other. Raise or lower the same-piece tolerance and watch the schedule merge or split.
5. Hover any piece for its name, type and size; click a row of the schedule to find that piece in the model.
6. Switch to PLATE for the flat layout, and set the plate width and gap until it packs the way you want.
7. Export the schedule and part list as CSV, the arrangement on screen as OBJ or Rhino .3dm, and the plate as an SVG at 1 mm per unit.
8. Hand it on: Analyze in Proving Ground sends the ASSEMBLED building — the pieces you have visible — to be judged against sun, wind, ventilation, views and carbon. Hide the framing and keep the siding, sheathing and roof first, and Proving Ground reads the skin as a massing instead of 2,400 sticks.

Code-aware stairs & ramps

1. Choose Stairs or Ramp, and set the units — the tool speaks Imperial or Metric, and rounds measurements to the precision you pick.
2. Enter the floor-to-floor height, then drive the flight either By riser target or By count.
3. Pick the layout — Straight, L-shape with a quarter landing, U-shape with a half landing, or Switchback — and set the width and the going.
4. Read the checks as you go: the 2R + G rule of thumb, the landing minimum, and the per-run cap. For a ramp, the max slope ladder runs from 1:8 (too steep) through 1:12 (ADA) to 1:20.
5. Read Plan & section beside the 3D model, then export the OBJ plus a dimensioned SVG plan and section (or a PNG).

The body against found architecture — a field instrument

1. MEASURE A BODY FIRST. Six numbers with a tape — stature, shoulders, chest depth, hips, head breadth, head length — take about ninety seconds on the person next to you. The reference rows in the picker are a comparison, not your cohort.
2. SQUEEZE: type the hole's clear width and height, how deep the passage is, and what you are carrying. Every posture answers at once, easiest first, and the head is checked on its own because a skull does not compress. The reference-openings list loads the code's own minimum doors and hatches into the sliders so you can see how far the thing in front of you sits from one.
3. CHUTE: set slope, length and what is rubbing on what, and read exit speed, time down and the run-out it would take to stop. Then do it properly: time a ride from rest, open Solve μ from a timed ride, and replace the table's guess with the real slide's own coefficient. The gap between the two numbers is the lesson.
4. MEMBER: pick the section off the shelf (rebar, schedule-40 pipe, square tube, sawn lumber) or measure one you found, set the span, how it is held and who is on it — and move the IMPACT slider, which is the number that decides everything. Read which check governs and the load at which it runs out.
5. CLIMB: rise and going give the pitch and its name; the group's shortest and tallest statures say whether the move is a step, a haul or a mantle, and whether the handhold is even reachable.
6. Log any reading with the place you took it and a note about what the tool cannot see. Export the log as CSV, or as a printable field sheet with a blank column to write in tomorrow.

Assembly study · walls, roofs, floors · thermal, moisture, matter

1. Start from a preset wall, roof or floor — each preset teaches one lesson — or stack your own layers exterior first. The assembly kind sets the ASHRAE surface films and the code reference line.
2. Frame a cavity layer with wood or steel studs and watch the effective R fall below the label value — steel studs fall furthest, and that gap is the point.
3. Set the winter and summer conditions; the temperature and vapour charts beside the section name the condensation plane if there is one. Check a cold-month mean, not just the design low.
4. Read thickness, weight, cost and embodied carbon for the stack you actually drew.
5. Save iterations to the compare bench to hold two assemblies side by side.
6. Export the section SVG or the assembly JSON — and visit the thermal-bridge gallery (parapet, slab edge, rim joist, window jamb, cantilevered balcony) for what a one-dimensional stack structurally cannot see.

Cut-and-fold module → aggregated screen

1. Rule three lines on the card — this is the flat sheet the module is folded from.
2. Make two cuts at the ends, then set every remaining segment to a mountain or a valley fold.
3. Turn the module in 3D to read the folded result, or Re-fold from flat to watch it close. Randomize design when you want to see what the system can do.
4. Aggregate the wall into an N×M field to read the pattern at building scale rather than at card scale.
5. Export the cut sheet SVG at true scale (print at 100% and it folds) or the design JSON.

Hanging-mobile balance · the seesaw law

1. Start from a preset mobile, or build your own: Branch into an arm to grow the tree, and hang plates below any pivot.
2. Click any arm or plate to edit it — mass, arm length, pivot position.
3. Auto-balance this arm solves the pivot to the arm's centre of mass; Auto-balance all does the whole tree at once. Collapse to one weight reduces a branch to its equivalent mass, which is how the balance is actually computed.
4. Watch it sway — the arms are rigid and the pivots are real, so a change up the tree moves everything below it.
5. Export the mobile as SVG or PNG, or save the .calder.json to come back to it.

One model · waffle, contour or print prep

1. Load a model once — pick a parametric form (saddle, dome, barrel vault, cone, peak, waves) or import your own STL / OBJ / PLY / .3dm. It feeds all three strategies.
2. Set the model's units and up-axis orientation so the millimetres mean something before you cut anything.
3. Waffle: set the rib counts across X and Y, the material thickness and the kerf, and read the interlocking cut sheet.
4. Contour: set the sheet thickness and it traces each level, numbered for stacking, with a registration score on the next layer.
5. Print prep: pick your printer and bed, layer height, infill and orientation, and read the bed fit, overhangs and time estimate — estimates, not a slicer.
6. Export millimetre-true SVG cut sheets, or the PNG view for the sheet.

Interlocking ribs · laser-ready

1. Pick a parametric form — saddle, dome, barrel vault, cone, peak, waves — or import your own STL / OBJ / PLY.
2. Set the footprint width, depth and height so the model is at the size you'll actually cut.
3. Set the rib counts across X and across Y, the material thickness and the kerf — the slots are cut to thickness minus kerf, which is why a wrong kerf gives you a loose or unassemblable model.
4. Read the nested cut sheet: every rib labelled, laid out to your sheet width.
5. Export the SVG cut sheet at true millimetres for the laser, or the PNG view.

Stacked-layer topo model · laser-ready

1. Load a parametric form or a contour map, or drop in your own STL / OBJ / PLY — terrain works as well as a building.
2. Set the footprint and height, then the sheet thickness; the number of layers follows from it.
3. Turn on Score next layer for registration so each sheet carries the outline of the one above and the stack can't drift.
4. Read the layer count and check the top and bottom slices actually exist before you cut.
5. Export the numbered, millimetre-true SVG cut sheet for stacking, or the PNG view.

Surveyor ground → physical site model

1. In Surveyor, run Sync → “Cut a site model (Relief)” so your measured ground arrives here — or start on the demo landform. A preset sets the studio's setups (TA section 27″ → nine 9″ chunks, Individual @ 1/8″ or 1/4″); every field stays editable.
2. Aim the chunk on the KEY MAP: drag the footprint over the shaded survey (Aerial or USGS topo underneath), zoom in, and nudge it with the arrow keys — 10 ft a press, 1 ft with Shift. The east–west / north–south shifts and rotation move the same chunk, which can never leave the surveyed surface, and the footprint's own latitude and longitude are printed under the map (Copy corners hands you all four).
3. Read the model under Display's sun: shadows, mesh edges and draped contours at your interval.
4. Pick the fabrication: a 3-D print shell (shell thickness, printer bed, surface detail — the model tiles itself to fit), a waffle (rib spacing, thickness, kerf — laser-cut it or print it assembled), stacked slabs (one contour layer per sheet of stock, the next layer scored on each), or the paper top surface (the skin developed flat into fold-scored strips).
5. PRINT IN CHUNKS: pick the printer, then ask for the grid you want under Print chunks — “3 × 3” on a 27″ model gives nine 9.00″ pieces exactly, the same grid for the shell tiles and the waffle blocks. “Fit the bed” picks the fewest pieces that fit. Every piece butts on flat planes and the zip carries an assembly map; oversize pieces and anything taller than the printer’s Z are named before you export, not at the machine.
6. LINE UP A SET: under Model z = 0, a shared datum makes every model in the set measure from the SAME elevation, so five sites stand at their true relative heights instead of all starting at the table. Type the same datum into each one — below the lowest site’s ground. “Lift printed in” builds it into the piece (hollow, but it grows the print); “riser made separately” keeps the print short and tells you how thick a spacer to cut, which is the right answer once the sites are far apart.
7. Set the stock: sheet size and nesting gap drive every laser export; slots are cut at thickness − kerf for a press fit.
8. Export: STL (shell tiles or the assembled waffle, model mm), DXF sheets per mode (layers CUT / SCORE / LABEL / SHEET, model inches — millimetres under the metric toggle), and the Rhino .3dm of the same chunk FULL SIZE with contours.

make a physical portrait of a place you scanned with a phone

1. Scan the site on a phone (an iPhone LiDAR app), export a mesh GLB — not Draco-compressed, not USDZ — and import it here. Nothing uploads; over-budget scans are simplified on import with the cost spoken.
2. Listen to the scan report — it is the viewfinder: spans, interior holes vs the normal sheet edge, the fitted ground plane, coverage by bearing in the scan's own frame, and the resolution sentence.
3. Level the floor: one button rotates the fitted ground plane flat to zero and takes the tilt out (this also fixes a Y-up phone export without you ever hearing the word axis).
4. Scale by a measurement: tape one span on site, pick which box span you taped, type the feet. The scan's own scale claim is never trusted silently — the disagreement is spoken.
5. Crop: type a window in feet and crop to it, or Keep the largest piece to drop floating scan debris. Every crop says what percentage of the surface it removed.
6. Place the scan with typed east–west / south–north shifts and a rotation — stored numbers, applied at rasterize time, the same idiom as Relief.
7. Pick the model scale and the printer. The readout states the coverage sentence, the chunk grid, and the honest limit: a heightfield keeps the top surface, and the overhang regions that flattened are named with their area and lost undercut.
8. Export: STL print chunks (model mm, zipped with the scan's caveats and an assembly map — A1 is the north-west corner), and the same ground FULL SIZE as a Rhino .3dm in feet with contours. Every download is announced.

print a jig that holds a wire model true, and read its scale by touch

1. Pick the BOARD first. Two tactile boards came out of this collaboration and the tool makes both. Plate is John’s v1: round holes, half-round wire channels in the top face, and a ruler of raised ticks, inch lines and Braille domes, on a square grid, a polar grid or both. Lattice tile is the v2 board that was printed and approved (2026-10-08): the same 1/8 in pitch, but square holes, the wire channels moved to the BACK, the ruler ENGRAVED into a continuous top face so nothing can break off, and interlocking finger edges pinned with filament so two tiles hinge flat or at 90°. The tile has one control — its size in cells — because every other dimension came out of John’s Grasshopper file; every control below describes the plate.
2. Start from a preset — Square 1/4 in is the plain jig, Round barn is Fraser's 60 ft dairy barn as a polar zone on a square site — or set the plate: rectangle or disc, width and depth, thickness (1/4 in stands a wire up straight).
3. Turn on the square grid and pick its pitch (1/8 or 1/4 in), the polar grid and pick its ring pitch and spoke count, or both: with both on, the polar zone is cleared of square holes and its edge is a raised ring. Turn Fill the field off to set the polar DIAMETER, and Centre of the field off to put the centre anywhere — on the corner of the site, if that is where the barn is: the rings run off the plate's edge, the holes outside are left off and counted, and the square grid takes the rest. The centre snaps to the ruler's lattice so its coordinates read as clean fractions.
4. Print the FIT COUPON first (Export → STL — fit coupon): five holes over your wire, a step apart, numbered in Braille. Push the wire into each; the snug one is the plate's hole diameter — set it in Holes. A printed hole comes out 0.2–0.3 mm under its modelled size, which is why the coupon exists.
5. Decide what crosses the field: raised inch lines (cut by the holes they pass), or GROOVES — a half-round channel between the holes along every grid line, a pipe of the hole's width cut half a wire deep, so a wire laid flat sits in a round bed and stays on its line. Grooves replace the raised lines on the same lines; the rulers stay.
6. Check the tactile scale: a tick at every hole along the bottom and left edges, a longer tick and a UEB numeral at every inch (number sign optional), a raised triangle in the origin corner. Give the plate a Braille title for its top edge.
7. Read the read-back beside the plan — it says every number that prints, the thinnest wall, how many pieces the bed needs, the material — and every WARNING. Say "read the plate" in voice mode to hear it.
8. Pick the printer. A plate wider than the bed square (less the clearance) is cut into pieces between the holes, named r1c1 from the top-left; a polar zone that cannot be cut between holes is cut through its centre along a spoke, and the read-back says how many holes are halved.
9. On the lattice tile, pick its LAYOUT: Square is the approved board; Circular lays the same 1/8 in pitch, square holes and back wire channels out in rings around a centre hole — a disc 2 to 8 in across, channels along every ring and the eight compass directions, no ruler and no finger edges (the circular layout is the tool's own, not part of the approved board). The Preset list follows the board: the lattice's presets are v1's wherever the lattice can make them honestly (the 1/8 in square jig, the 7 in polar disc) plus the approved 66-cell tile; the 1/4 in and round-barn plates have none. Say "circular lattice" or "square lattice".
10. On the lattice tile, Export gives the STL — one watertight solid, the tile and its fingers less the holes, the pin channels, the back grooves and the engraved mat — and the Rhino pair, where surfaces ships the UNCUT tile with each family of cutters on its own layer to BooleanDifference yourself. There is no pieces row and no fit coupon: the tile fits a P1S in one piece, and to get a smaller one you change the CELLS, which keeps the lattice rule, rather than slicing the geometry. The mat is the top 1.016 mm of the plate, so the two-filament split is set at the printer — an STL carries no colour.
11. Export: STL — the plate (or the pieces, zipped with the read-back), built and checked by the Manifold kernel: one shell, no void, genus equal to the holes. Rhino .3dm — surfaces arrives CUT: the plate is one Extrusion with every hole a round inner profile, the raised work Breps on their own layers; with grooves or blind holes on (a boolean the browser cannot run) the plate is the kernel-cut mesh, the uncut NURBS plate and its pipe cutters sit on layers that open OFF, and the RhinoPython cut script finishes them into one solid in Rhino. Mesh is the finished print. Settings JSON to share; the read-back as a .brf for an embosser. Save keeps the set-up in your Work.

print people for a model — posed like you, at your scale, for your printer

1. Pick where the pose comes from: a preset (standing, walking, sitting, waving, pointing, arms folded, on the phone, in a wheelchair), your photo, your phone scan — or a crowd.
2. For a photo: one person, the whole body in the frame, head visible, facing the camera, closer than about 14 ft. The pose model runs in this browser — the photo never uploads — and draws the pose it found over your photo; a limb it could not see is dashed and borrowed from the standing pose. Depth from the photo keeps 35 % of its front-to-back guess by default: one photo sees across and up well and only guesses depth.
3. For a scan: open the GLB, OBJ, PLY, STL or 3DM your scanning app exported (compression off). The floor under the feet is found and trimmed; set Up is / Upside down if it arrives lying down, and Trim above the floor for a lumpy floor.
4. Pose it by hand under Pose by hand: pick a part (or click a limb on the figure) and turn its dials — lean, side and twist for the torso; look down and tilt for the head; swing, raise, turn and the elbow for each arm; lift, step out and the knee for each leg. Every dial at 0 is the pose as it came; Reset puts a part back. Left and right are the figure's own.
5. Or DRAG the joints: turn on Drag joints (under Pose by hand, or the button in the view) and orange handles appear on the hands, elbows, feet, knees, head and chest. Drag one and its limb follows — a hand bends the elbow to reach and swings the shoulder to aim, the elbow kept low where the dials allow — and the part's dials move with it, so the read-back, Reset and the settings file all keep up. The figure holds still while you drag and settles onto the floor when you let go. Drag anywhere else to turn the view.
6. Pick a Body — a man's, a woman's, or the average of the two: every width, depth and girth is the survey's mean for it (ANSUR II), scaled to the height you type. Pick an Age for a child — the height jumps to the median for that age (CDC 2000) and the proportions become a child's: a bigger head for the height, shorter legs (under twelve, the average body). Type the child's own height after if you know it. Then set the build.
7. Pick the model scale and your printer. Any limb thinner than the printer can hold at that scale is thickened to it — the read-back names which, and by how much. Base disc on to stand it. A sitting figure Sits on a seat block, a wheelchair fitted to it (24 in wheels at an adult's size, checked against the ADA's 30 × 48 in clear floor space), or nothing.
8. For a crowd: set how many people (2–24), who (adults, adults and children, children), and which poses go in the mix. Heights come from the CDC growth charts, so most adults land between 5′-4″ and 5′-11″; Shuffle draws new people, and the crowd number brings the same crowd back.
9. Slide the mesh reducer for a low-poly figure: fewer, bigger facets. It never cuts inside the printable body, so the thinnest limb survives any setting.
10. Read the read-back (or say "read the figure"): the height at scale, what was thickened, the triangles, the grams of PLA, and whether it needs supports.
11. Export: Watertight STL at the figure's scale for Bambu Studio — a crowd is one plate of closed shells, one per person — or a Rhino .3dm full size in feet: surfaces (each part of the body a closed NURBS solid — the torso, each limb, the head — and a wheelchair's boxes and cylinders, you can edit and BooleanUnion) or the print mesh. Settings JSON keeps the set-up; a photo's pose saves as 22 body points, never the photo.

trade light for depth — the exposure triangle on a real set

1. Open a set — Gaffer's saved scene, or one of the built-in sets — and you're standing behind the camera on a lit stage.
2. Open the aperture and watch two things happen at once: the meter climbs and the depth of field collapses.
3. Pay the light back with shutter speed or ISO and bring the meter back to zero — that's the exposure triangle, run as a live loop rather than a diagram.
4. Try the on-camera, bounce and fill-flash sets, or switch Flash on for any kit: tag lights ⚡ flash vs continuous, and watch the shutter stop touching the flash-lit side while it keeps pricing the ambient one — push past the sync speed to see the frame band, then flip on high-speed sync to clear it.
5. Set the focal length and the camera position, and use Level & centre when the verticals go.
6. Export a captioned frame PNG, or save the setup JSON.

choose whose eyes — the height, the lens, the distance

1. Work through the four guided lessons in order, or free-orbit and drive the rig yourself.
2. 1 — What a lens does: change focal length and sensor size (full frame, APS-C, Micro 4/3) and watch the field of view open and close.
3. 2 — Perspective is distance, not lens: lock subject size and dolly; the figure stays the same size while the background transforms. This is the one most people have backwards.
4. 3 — Depth of field: open the aperture and set the focus distance — focus the figure or the façade and watch the other go soft.
5. 4 — Keeping buildings straight: compare tilting the camera up against shifting the lens, and watch the verticals converge or hold.
6. Read the rig in plan and elevation beside the frame, then Save frame (PNG) with a caption burned in.

light it and feel the mood — no scores here

1. Pick a subject and a paper or ground, then place lights, bounce cards, flags and scrims by dragging them in plan and section — the two views drive the same 3D set.
2. Set each light's intensity, size, colour and gel, and Aim at focus or Make key.
3. Read the live path-traced photograph as you drag — soft shadows, bounce and falloff are all being solved, so a bigger source really does soften the edge.
4. Load a preset setup (three-point, Rembrandt and the other classics) and solo lights one at a time to see what each one is actually doing.
5. Export the render PNG, or save the scene JSON — Lens opens the same set to photograph it through a real camera.

one model, fourteen projections — the whole taxonomy, with the maths shown

1. Import a model — GLB, glTF, STL, OBJ, PLY or Rhino .3dm — or press Demo.
2. Pick a FAMILY first (Multiview · Axonometric · Oblique · Perspective), then the type inside it. The breadcrumb under the chips is your place in the taxonomy; the paragraph below it says what that projection is and why anyone draws one.
3. Hover or tab onto any chip to read the method — the actual camera direction, shear or mapping the tool is using, not just a name.
4. Multiview: Plan and Elevation are single primary views; Third-angle and First-angle are whole sheets — the same three drawings, mirrored across the front view. Compare the two and the convention IS the difference.
5. Axonometric: Isometric is 1 : 1 : 1 at 30°, Dimetric 1 : 1 : ½ at 7°11′ and 41°25′, Trimetric all three different. Free (orbit) prints the live foreshortening — drag until all three read the same and you have found isometric by hand.
6. Oblique: set the true-shape face, the receding angle and the depth ratio — Cavalier keeps full depth, Cabinet halves it, Military puts the oblique on a plan turned 45° with the heights straight up the page.
7. Perspective: 1-, 2- and 3-point are camera positions, not different projections, so orbit and watch the read-out count the vanishing points change. Curvilinear is a real fisheye (cube map, equidistant mapping) — every straight edge bends.
8. Pick a Display mode to draw the model in one of the Inker's looks — Moebius to poché, or YOURS, whatever you last built at /inker.
9. Export the framed view as a PNG (a sheet keeps its pane rules and titles), or the Rhino Python script that sets the SAME projection up in your own Rhino document.

Board & page layout · multi-artboard → PDF

1. In the Paper panel, set the sheet size, orientation, margins and export resolution.
2. Add blocks — title, text, image, rectangle — then drag, resize and snap them to the grid. Double-click a text block to type in place.
3. Format the selected block in the Inspector: font, size, alignment, fill, and how an image fits its frame (contain, cover or stretch).
4. Give every image its alt text as you place it — the field is right there in the block, and the export carries it.
5. Add more boards in the left rail to build a set, then export one board as PNG, all boards as a single multi-page PDF, or the layout JSON.
6. Make a tactile plate turns the board into a swell-paper-ready plate.

Transformation diagram · the numbered strip

1. Start from a footprint — rectangle, L, U, bar, courtyard, corner — or draw your own plan outline, in feet.
2. Add moves in order: extrude, carve, notch, shift, lift, terrace, taper, twist, split, stack. Each move becomes a frame in the strip.
3. Reorder, duplicate or delete moves; Ghost all shows what came before under each frame.
4. Set ONE projection for the whole strip — an axon at an angle you choose, or plan, or elevation — and the scale is shared too, so the frames are genuinely comparable.
5. Write a caption per frame saying WHY the move happened, not what it was. A frame missing its caption is flagged, and it doesn't block the export.
6. Run the shuffle test — if the moves read just as well in a random order, the sequence isn't doing the work you think. Record your own verdict.
7. Export the strip as SVG or PNG, plus sequence.json.

make the line perspective the pin-up actually needs

1. Import a model — .3dm, OBJ, GLB, glTF, STL or PLY.
2. Set the camera: eye height, focal length and where it looks; pick the frame aspect (4:3, 3:2, 16:9, 1:1 or A-series).
3. Add cut planes — X, Y or a horizontal Z plane for a plan cut — to draw a section rather than an elevation.
4. Grade the lineweight by depth so the drawing reads front to back, and check which lines get drawn: the page says exactly how visibility is decided and what it does not do.
5. Export the drawing as a layered SVG at 1 unit = 1 mm, so it opens true-size in Illustrator or Rhino, plus the camera JSON.

lay out a 36″ sheet of several constructed perspectives — folded, walked, stitched or collaged

1. Open your model (.3dm, OBJ, GLB, glTF, STL, PLY) — or keep the demo round barn, or pick “No model” for a construction-only underlay to draw over by hand.
2. SHEET tab — the page: size and margin; start from a layout (one view, a folded triptych, nine stations at one scale, interiors pasted over an exterior, moving stations, a fold at eye level, a 360° panorama — with a plan panel if you want one), or ARRANGE the frames you have into a grid, columns, rows, a hero with a band or side column, or a cascade. “Keep each view's angle of view” re-frames the drawings instead of cropping them. Add views and plan panels, reorder them front to back.
3. STATIONS tab — the eyes: walk them along a line, round an orbit, fan them from one point (“turn by each view's own angle” makes butted frames meet like a folded picture plane) or set them on a grid, and aim them along the path, at a target, outward or at one bearing. The hollow marks on the plan show where they will go before you press Place; “Pick … on the plan” sets a point with one click. Copy any setting from the selected view to all of them.
4. VIEW tab — one view: its station, eye height, bearing and tilt; Aim at a point (optionally putting the picture plane through it, so the point draws at scale); the picture surface — flat, cylindrical or spherical — its distance and scale; the frame's place, size and shape; align it to the margin, split it into two windows onto one drawing, fold a view on to its right, align every horizon.
5. By hand on the sheet: drag a frame (it snaps to a grid and to the other frames' edges), Alt/Option-drag to slide the frame over a drawing that stays put, drag the corner to resize, drag the red dot to move the centre of vision. Ctrl/Cmd+Z undoes; zoom in to check a junction.
6. PEN tab — the sheet's pen (near and far lineweights, profile lines, hidden lines, crease angle, the cut and poché, a ground grid) and the construction's layers, line weight and label size. Each view can override its own weight, hidden lines, construction and caption.
7. Read the construction off the sheet and the readout, then export the sheet SVG at true size (re-traced at full quality, a layer group per view), the stations as Rhino named views, or one view's camera JSON.

print or import a rigorous perspective grid to draw over by hand, and learn what each point on it is

1. Pick the system across the top of the rail — 1-pt to 5-pt. Each switch sets a sensible camera for that system; the sheet, the eye and the grid unit are yours and stay.
2. SHEET — the paper (Letter, Tabloid, ARCH C/D/E, the 36″ square, an iPad screen, or custom), its orientation and margin. The grid is clipped to the margin.
3. CAMERA — eye height (the horizon IS eye level), the viewing distance (or the back wall's distance in one-point; the cylinder's or sphere's radius in four- and five-point), the architect's scale that is true on the picture plane, the grid's turn α (90° faces a wall squarely), the pitch in three-point, and where the horizon and the centre of vision sit on the sheet.
4. ROOM / CORNER — the grid unit, the room's width and height (or the corner's wall height), and how far the ground grid runs.
5. Or drag the points on the sheet: HL up and down; GL to set the scale; VPL and VPR (the station point stays on the semicircle); VPV in three-point (the CV follows as the orthocentre); the DPs or SP to set the viewing distance; a four-point VP to turn the grid; VPT/VPB to resize the hemisphere. Every drag has a slider and a typed number in the rail.
6. Hover any point on the sheet's readout to see HOW it was found; read the lesson for what the system is, what to check on your own drawing, and where it breaks. Turn on the eye-height posts to see every top meet the horizon.
7. LAYERS — ground, walls, ceiling, posts, diagonals, construction, cone, labels — and the pen weight. Then Export: the PDF at true size to print and draw over, the SVG with a layer per kind of line, or the transparent PNG for Morpholio Trace / Procreate (black, light grey or non-photo blue, 150 or 300 dpi).

build the drawing as a collage, with the horizon doing the scaling

1. Set a board format — A3 portrait or landscape, square, 16:9 — and a ground colour or texture.
2. Drop in images, rectangles, ellipses and text; Import image or paste straight onto the board.
3. Cut an image out with the Polygon scissors, then stack, reorder and blend layers in the Inspector; Monochrome tint flattens a photo into the drawing's palette.
4. Set the horizon and eye height, and entourage dropped from the Entourage Library scales itself to them — oversize a figure and the board tells you.
5. Add filters and grain, or send a layer through Halftone & Riso to get the printed register.
6. Export PNG at 1× or 2×, or save the project JSON.

put the model in the real site photo, honestly

1. Load a site photograph.
2. Build two bundles of parallel edges — lines along the building that are parallel in reality — and the two vanishing points solve the camera's focal length and orientation.
3. Mark one known height (a standing person, a door leaf, a garage door, a storey) to give the solve its scale. Two vanishing points alone give you no size — the page is explicit about that.
4. Read the solved camera: focal length in pixels, eye height, and the assumption you are making by accepting it.
5. Rectify — flatten a façade by placing its four corners and giving one known length; it refuses when the corners can't be a rectangle, and that refusal is the honest answer.
6. Export the camera JSON or the rectified elevation PNG.

Paper-collage stop motion · after Terry Gilliam

1. Load the demo (a talking head) or import your own images — scans of real paper cutouts with transparent backgrounds work best.
2. Select a piece and drag the ◎ hinge to where the joint really is — a jaw hinges at the back, an arm at the shoulder — then swing it with the round handle.
3. ✂ Cut a piece out of another one (torn edge optional) to make a mouth, a jaw or a limb; the cut becomes its own hinged piece.
4. Pose, press ◉ Capture frame (C), nudge, capture again — onion-skin ghosts show the frames before. About 12 captures make a second.
5. Play it back (Space) at a low frame rate — Gilliam shot at about 12 — and export a looping GIF, a numbered frame sheet, or a stage still.

choose colours on purpose — and find out why the ones you had were fighting

1. Pick a seed colour and a scheme, then flip the basis between OKLCh and HSL and watch the lightness column: an HSL triad scatters, an OKLCh triad holds.
2. Orbit the 3D colour solid and drag the morph slider between the four spaces — HSL is a tidy cylinder, and the real gamut is not.
3. Open Complements for all four answers to "what is the opposite of this?", each labelled with the system it belongs to.
4. Use the Gamut mask or the Centroid Picker to build a palette from a region rather than one swatch at a time.
5. Run the Audit: contrast under both metrics, colour-vision-deficiency simulation, and the photocopy test — the one your drawings will actually face.
6. Check it under mixed light: slide the kelvin and watch the scheme move, because the illuminant is part of the palette.
7. Export hex, CSS custom properties (sRGB plus an oklch() line), JSON or a swatch sheet PNG. Copy share link puts the palette in the URL; every swatch also names its nearest ISCC-NBS centroid with the ΔE beside it.

screen an image into printable ink plates

1. Load an image (drop, paste, or choose).
2. Pick a mode: halftone screening, a two-ink Riso separation, duotone, line screen, engraving, crosshatch or stipple.
3. Set the dot shape, the ruling, the screen angle and the inks — the Riso palettes are the real ones (Fluoro Pop, Comic Ink, Cyanotype, Process Riso), on a paper colour you choose.
4. Read the comparison sheet to see the same image under several screens at once before you commit.
5. Export the composite PNG, the per-ink plate masters (Voice A / Voice B) for a real two-pass print, or vector SVG dots.

trace a raster into editable line work

1. Load a raster — a scan, a photo of a drawing, or a screenshot.
2. Pick the method: Outline traces line work as strokes, Fill traces solid shapes as filled paths.
3. Tune threshold, cleanup, simplify and smooth, and zoom in to check the trace against the original rather than trusting the thumbnail.
4. Export SVG for Illustrator, or DXF at a width you set in millimetres for CAD, a laser or a plotter. Copy SVG to clipboard when you just want to paste it.

grow the image from rules — a field, not a photo

1. Set up the grid — square, brick or hex — with your rows, columns and cell size.
2. Pick the cell shape (circle, square, triangle, diamond, cross, louver) and drag the attractor point or path across the field.
3. Tune the response: min and max size, falloff, Rotate toward attractor, and Invert so near means small.
4. Switch to Outline only for a laser or a pen plotter, or keep the fill for a rendered pattern.
5. Export SVG, PNG, or DXF in millimetres straight into Rhino, AutoCAD or a laser cutter.

Architectural hatch fills

1. Pick a material pattern — concrete, brick, CMU, stone, earth, sand, gravel, wood grain and end-grain, steel, batt and rigid insulation, or solid poché.
2. Set the drawing scale (1:20 through 1:200) and the tool sizes the pattern to it — the real repeat is printed beside it so you can check.
3. Set line weight, density/spacing and rotation, and preview it on a wall corner rather than an abstract square.
4. Download SVG at true millimetres, PNG, or Copy the SVG pattern to paste as a reusable fill.

Graphic scale bar + north arrow

1. Pick the unit system and the drawing scale — a metric ratio or an imperial architect's scale.
2. Set the drawn length, the number of cells, and whether the lead cell is sub-divided; pick a style (solid, alternating, checker, open boxes, stepped, ruler, wavy).
3. Add a north arrow — needle, star or simple — set its rotation, and place it above or below.
4. Set the type: font, size, which values get labelled, and whether the unit rides on the last number.
5. Export an SVG sized in real millimetres (prints true at 100%) or a PNG, or copy the PNG straight to the clipboard.

Golden section, root rectangles…

1. Import a façade or plan image to analyse, or work on the draggable analysis frame alone.
2. Set the frame's aspect — free, square, 3:2, golden φ, or √2 — and fit it to what you're testing.
3. Overlay the systems: golden section and spiral, root rectangles (√2 · √3 · √5), rule of thirds, Fibonacci grid, Modulor bands, tatami/ken grid, symmetry axes and your own regulating lines.
4. Read the live ratios as you drag, and set line colour, style and weight so the overlay reads over your image.
5. Download PNG or SVG.

Scalable silhouettes for drawings

1. Pick a category — people (standing, walking, sitting, with a bag, small groups, children), trees (deciduous, conifer, columnar, palm, shrub, canopy), cars in plan and side, or furniture.
2. Drop items onto the canvas; they arrive at true scale against the reference figure and the ground line.
3. Set the canvas scale so the drawing agrees with yours, then drag, resize and Flip each item.
4. Download a transparent SVG or PNG of the whole set, or just the selected item, to layer over a drawing.

Measure any drawing · calibrate then measure

1. Drop, paste or load an image — a screenshot of a plan is the most common source.
2. Set the scale: click the two ends of a dimension you know and type its real length, or pick a named scale and the image's print DPI.
3. Pick a tool — Segment, Path, Area, Rect, Angle or Count — and measure on the drawing; every measurement gets a label you can edit.
4. Read the running totals: total length and total area across the measurements you've taken.
5. Export the measurements CSV, the annotated PNG, or the Scaler document JSON to come back and add more.

choose where to stand, then send the view to Rhino

1. Import your model (.3dm, .obj, .stl, .ply, .glb) and set the up axis — Z up for Rhino, Y up for OBJ and glTF.
2. Add a camera on the plan and aim it; the plan is a horizontal slice, with the footprint of every edge from above behind it.
3. Set eye height and lens, and watch the 60° cone of vision — anything outside it will distort, and the tool tells you when you've stepped past it.
4. Check the verticals: it says whether the camera is level, tilted, or pointing straight up or down, and whether the sun is behind you, raking, or down.
5. Name the keepers, then export the shot list — Rhino .3dm as named views, RhinoPython for the whole list or one shot, or the shot list JSON.

1. Sign in. A massing floats with a cut plane through it — slide the plane and the true section is drawn on it as you go.
2. Freehand your own poché on the canvas beside it, drawing what you think the cut looks like.
3. Score the sketch and read the diagnosis: region overlap (IoU), true poché covered, ink on true poché, with the misses named.
4. Read the fairness rules before you argue with the score — alignment is by position and uniform scale only; rotation and orientation are never corrected for you.
5. Next challenge → for another cut, or Redraw this cut to try the same one again. Optional: have Claude narrate the diagnosis.

make the viewport itself the drawing — and keep the mode in Rhino

1. Pick a preset from the shelf — Moebius, graphite, noir, blueprint, clay, terracotta, riso, poché — and orbit the still life to see how it draws.
2. Work the Lines group: one ink for everything, the silhouette a step heavier than interior edges; slide the crease angle to watch the dihedral test decide which edges exist.
3. Work Shading: one signature fill or layer colors, Flatten for the ambient term (100% is ligne claire, 0% full modeling), Shine 0 for matte.
4. Work Shadows: intensity, a colored shadow, blur — then drop the map size and the bias to meet the two classic shadow-map artifacts on purpose.
5. Read the right-hand panel: the lesson notes track your settings, and the live .ini shows the exact line every control writes.
6. Name the mode and Download .ini, then in Rhino: Options → View → Display Modes → Import…, and pick it from the viewport-title dropdown.

Model pre-flight · units, edges, inventory, bed fit

1. Drop a .3dm (Rhino), OBJ, STL, PLY or GLB / glTF — it's parsed in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
2. Read the report by severity: STOP is something that will break a downstream tool, WARN is something that probably will, NOTE is worth knowing.
3. It checks units and scale, naked and non-manifold edges, whether solids are closed, the object inventory and 3D-printer bed fit — and every finding names the tools it affects.
4. Click a finding, or an object row, to highlight it in the viewport and see the actual geometry it's talking about.
5. Export the report as Markdown or JSON, or Print / PDF it. Run this before Fabricator, Parts or Proving Ground and you'll save yourself the confusing failure later.

Program · adjacency · stacking

1. It opens with the ARCH 371 Champaign County Museum brief loaded verbatim — the memo's four sections are the departments, so the table's subtotals read straight against the handout — inside the Round Barn Centre: the barn and banquet hall (the barn against the hall's east face at its south-east corner) ARE the building, and all program packs inside their joined outline on every level. A 15 ft landscape buffer wraps them; parking and the rest of the exterior program stay beyond it, on the parcel. The Fit block in Analysis says how full each level is. Floors, heights, the parcel rectangle and every adjacency are the tool's opening guess: change them.
2. Set the site width and depth and the floor-to-floor, all in feet, then add spaces — each with a real area and a department. A rect can carry its own W : H proportion (1 = square).
3. A department is Program (counts in net, gross and FAR), Exterior (site area — plaza, parking — kept out of all three) or Existing (context: locked, drawn dashed, counted separately). Set it in Setup → Departments.
4. Draw relationships between spaces (drag the ◦ handle): Strong, Weak or Avoid. Auto-arrange packs the plan against them, inside the building. A link from a room to one of the two shapes is a wish to be in that shape (the lobby in the barn). Existing structures never move by engine or drag: right-click one to type its surveyed centre. Site & levels sets the landscape buffer and whether program may grow into it.
5. Switch layout engines — Pavilion (default): SANAA's plan geometry, the hall subdivided into one cell per room, rooms one corridor apart on a grid module, slack as courtyards, the barn a round room, and the rooms soft — drag one and the others slide and squish to make way, then settle back onto the module. A room you drop is anchored where you put it and gives way only to keep the plan legal; a room you lock never moves. Arrow keys move the selected space without a mouse. Or Forces (v2), free bubbles — and read how many adjacencies each one actually met.
6. Assign spaces to floors, then tilt into 3D Stack and orbit the massing that results. The site sheet sits at grade with the ground floor; the two pack together so the plaza works around the footprint.
7. Read the program table: building net, net→gross efficiency, exterior and existing footprints, built volume, site area and FAR.
8. Import a program CSV to start from a different brief, and export the program CSV, SVG or PNG.

1. No account is needed to hear and measure a room. Only the assistant, Save, the archive of analyses and Share links ask for sign-in, each in place; Export → Setup file is a guest's way to hand a setup on.
2. The page opens on a DEMO, and says so: Fraser's 60-foot round barn ENTIRE — the 16-faceted stable and its attached shed below the mow deck, the mow and its gambrel dome above — with four speakers playing the Jazz, after Mingus sound preset (bass, piano, horns and ride cymbal — the same sound presets Caustic offers, chosen under Speakers and listeners) and two listeners under the dome. It is a mesh, not a box; the banner lists every simplification. Importing a model, opening a setup or loading a room from Start from replaces the demo. Clear the demo gives the empty page, and this browser remembers it, so a reload stays empty; Open the demo brings it back. Both doors open on the demo — the Feel door (?door=feel) puts Hear first, the Measure door the numbers.
3. Every button is in the toolbar pinned at the top of the page — Room (Start from + Load · Import a room…), Place (Speaker · Place · Place mic · + Add speaker), Simulate (Run · Cancel · quality), Listen (▶ Play / ■ Stop · Solo · Hear dry · Hear before treatment · Sound ▾), Treat (Reach target ▾ · Clear treatments), Keep (Archive analysis) and Ask the Acoustician — so it stays in reach however far you scroll. Save and Export (the one-page report) sit in the bar above it.
4. Run simulation (toolbar) and read the echogram: a hard cone over a round floor GATHERS reflections back toward the middle, so they arrive late and loud — that is what a round barn does to a voice, and why C50 falls. Then put on headphones, ▶ Play this room and hear it.
5. The strip under the toolbar is the whole tool in one line: the formulas' RT60 for the whole room, the simulation's T30 at your listener, and what you'll hear. The 3D room stays pinned beside the panels on a laptop.
6. Start from another room — pick it in the list (it shows the room that is loaded), then press Load or Enter: Whole barn, Mow — under the dome (one enclosed volume, so its reverberation figure reads true), Stable + shed, one of the four presets (classroom, gym, chapel, living room) or Back to the shoebox for your own dimensions — or Import a room… (.3dm/.obj/.glb/.stl/.ply — materials by Rhino layer; confirm the units in the box that opens). Each room from Start from is a setup of its own: it comes with one speaker and one listener and no recordings. Every control is a Tab stop, and the arrow keys walk the toolbar (←/→), its menus (↑/↓) and the panels' lists.
7. Under Recordings, drop in your own recordings (WAV, MP3, M4A, OGG or FLAC; never uploaded) and say how loud each was — whisper, quiet room, conversation, busy street, bus passing, jackhammer, or a typed dB. Each plays at that loudness at 1 m, so a bus is louder than a conversation and quiet sources sound quiet (quieter than this page played them before V3). A recording named after a speaker attaches to it; a speaker whose recording is missing is silent and flagged with the file it expects.
8. Under Speakers and listeners, place up to 8 speakers and 4 listeners by typing east, north and height in feet, and turn each listener to a compass bearing or toward a speaker. Pick Hear from to choose the listener you hear and trace from; a listener already traced plays again without a new trace. A model's Rhino points on layers named Speakers and Listeners arrive placed, and curves on a Paths layer are kept for the walk.
9. Read the Hearing readout below Hear: for the listener you hear from, each speaker's direct sound (from where, relative to the way the listener faces, how far and how soon), then its first three echoes, the surface each came off, how much later and from which side — written from the same trace you hear. Hover or focus a line for how it is worked out.
10. Assign a material to each surface — or each imported layer — and watch the mid-band absorption move. Hover any picker to see whose table the coefficients come from. Put the audience in with People in the room: each seated person is counted as absorption in the formulas and the trace alike.
11. The target under Used for is for THIS room's volume — DIN 18041's formula for the use (a classroom capped by ANSI S12.60), with its basis on hover — and the headline card says which formula it is, the range it could be in with the coefficients at their published uncertainty, and why the confidence reads what it does (Why high / medium / low).
12. Read the numbers per octave band: RT60 against your target, EDT, C50 and C80 clarity, D50, and an STI estimate, computed by Sabine, Eyring and Arau side by side so you can see where the methods disagree. Once a trace has run, the selected speaker's traced T30 sits on the same chart as hollow squares, and in the table beside the formulas' column — the two systems on one picture.
13. Set the air under the toolbar — Air temperature (°F) and Relative humidity — and both tiers follow: the speed of sound, every mode's frequency, and the air absorption that shortens the 4 kHz tail of a big dry room.
14. Tap a room mode to see its pressure map, or ♪ to HEAR that frequency — headphones for the bass ones, which are the ones that matter.
15. Check the Flutter panel for parallel hard surfaces — the hatched diamonds mark where a slap echo lives.
16. The Treat — reach your target panel says how much absorption puts the headline on the target's centre line and lists the fixes as buttons — press one to apply it (Treat → Reach target ▾ in the toolbar has the same list), then read before vs after (Clear treatments undoes them).
17. Place the speakers and the microphone from the toolbar's Place group: + Add speaker (up to 8), pick the Speaker, press Place (or Place mic) and click a floor in the 3D room (it lands at ear height) — or type x / y / height in feet beside each speaker under Simulate, where its level and Remove live too. In an imported model a point inside a wall, a column or outside the room is flagged and left out of the run, never moved. Each speaker also has a Pattern (Voice — a talker, which beams forward above 1 kHz; Hand clap; or Omni, a point) and a facing (toward the microphone unless you turn it) under its Pattern fold — a talker turned away is heard duller and less clearly, which is what the trace now shows. Run traces the room ONCE, backwards from the microphone, and gives every speaker its own two-ear (binaural) impulse response — eight speakers cost the same as one. Quality is the trace's own ladder — Draft, Standard, High and Final (240,000 rays, minutes, the run before a crit); hover the picker for what each rung traces. The table compares every speaker's T30, EDT, C50, C80, D50, strength G, IACC, LF and DRR at the mic (hover a heading for how it is computed).
18. Turn the listener's head with Microphone facing (under Simulate, beside the mic): it starts facing speaker 1, and turning it re-renders from the same trace in a moment — no new trace.
19. Put on headphones and mix it on the MIXING BOARD (Hear this room): one channel strip per speaker — its fader IS the speaker's level, its source is the speaker's sound (13 synthesized sounds, speech, your own file, or your microphone), with mute, solo, trim, high-pass, four-band EQ, compressor, pan, room and direct sends, groups, a master with a safety limiter, and four scenes. ▶ Play loops every speaker through its own binaural impulse response, so a speaker on your left is on your left; Hear dry flips to the room-less reference; Hear before treatment swaps in the untreated room while it plays. Before the first trace the room is an approximate one rebuilt from the reverberation time, and the board says so.
20. Drive the board without the mouse: Tab to the console cursor (← → channel, PgUp/PgDn control, ↑ ↓ turn, M S P, B for dry/room, W where you are, D what changed, ? for every key) — or in voice mode say “solo speaker two”, “speaker one fader minus six”, “hear it dry”, “what are the numbers”, “play the mix”.
21. Hear the reading without the screen: in voice mode say “read the verdict” (the headline, every band's grade, the bass modes, the flutter pairs, the confidence), “what is the target” (and where it comes from), “how sure are you”, “read the room”, “what does C50 mean” (any term), “what would fix it” (the missing absorption and the solver's fixes, numbered), “apply fix one”, “clear the treatments”, “read the surfaces” or “what is the ceiling made of”, “what is the air”. Edit by voice too: “set the ceiling to acoustic tile”, “set the length to 40”, “this is a lecture hall”, “add 20 people”, “face speaker 2”, “run the simulation”. A question the page cannot answer is said back to you, not dropped. Any edit that moves the headline — a material, a dimension, the air, a fix — is followed by the new reading, spoken once. The material pickers are named “Ceiling material”, “Floor material”…, so “set ceiling material to acoustic ceiling tile” works too.
22. Export → Room render (.wav) renders the board exactly as set, offline, in stereo; Export → Impulse response — Speaker N (.wav) saves each speaker's two-ear impulse response to convolve any dry recording with. Ask the Acoustician ↓ jumps to the assistant for a written reading of what you're hearing.
23. Export → One-page report (.png) saves a printable PNG: the room, the band chart against its target, the verdicts, the moves and the seat-to-seat run, with its sources and limits in the footer.
24. Keep and send the whole project: Save keeps it in your Work — the room itself too (an imported model, a piped room, or which part of the barn), every speaker, the mic and the board. Share ⧉ → Make a link gives a link a signed-in classmate opens for 90 days; Download the project file (also Export → Project file) works with no sign-in, and Share ⧉ → Open a project file reads one back. An imported room too big for a Work save is kept by name only — the Save note says so; use the file.

hear a curved room before it is built — and show it as sound, not a picture

1. Pick a room from Start from — Serra's Torqued Ellipse opens by default, at the scale of the Dia Beacon pieces — or build one: Shape, radius / semi-axes, wall height, the twist and lean of a torqued rim, the turns and corridor of a spiral, the rise of a dome or vault, an oculus, an entrance slot, open to the sky or roofed.
2. Give each surface a material — weathering steel, polished stainless, plaster, concrete, glass; gravel, grass, a plaza, water or snow underfoot. Hover a picker to see whose table the coefficients come from. Surface roughness scales every material's scattering: 0 is a perfect mirror.
3. The plan shows the wall at the ground (thick), the rim (dashed where it has turned), the foci, the listener with two ears, every channel at its stand, and the floor map once traced. Switch to 3D to orbit it. Press Run the trace — with Live re-trace on, every change re-traces quickly by itself.
4. Read the floor map: Focusing shows where early reflections gather (a concave wall's hot spot), Room gain how much louder than open air each point is, Level what a meter would read. Hover the legend for the method.
5. Walk: with the Listener panel focused, the arrow keys step 3 ft and turn 45°, W A S D step by compass, L says where you stand. Every step speaks your position, the nearest wall and where the focus lies — and re-traces the room under you. Or say 'walk north three steps', 'face east', 'where is the focus'.
6. Read What the curves do: the concave mirror's focal distance, the ellipse's two foci and constant path, the dome's centre and its one-packet echo, the whispering-gallery condition, the spiral corridor's own note, what the open sky takes. Stand there jumps the listener to the spot.
7. Mix the portrait on the board. Keys while it has focus: 1–8 select a strip and speak it, ↑↓ nudge the fader (Shift ±3 dB), M mute, S solo, R read the meters in words, D describe the strip, A audition it alone, Space play/stop, ? the key list. Every fader speaks in dB; every change announces itself. By voice: 'mute the choir', 'set the clap to minus six', 'choir up three', 'read the meters'.
8. Open a strip's EQ · place · aim · time to EQ it (three bands), move it (or Place on the plan), aim it — a narrow beam along a steel wall is how a whisper creeps round a gallery — and set when it starts. Add a channel from the master strip: a live microphone through the room (headphones), or an audio file.
9. Record the portrait renders the whole board offline through its rooms into a stereo WAV. Export the impulse response of any channel for a convolution reverb, the written portrait as text, the room as JSON or as a Rhino mesh. Sign in to Save it to a Work.
10. Read the portrait: the tool writes it from its own numbers — shape, materials, Eyring and traced reverberation, clarity, focus, creep, what left to the sky, the hot and quiet points, the low end, the board. Read the portrait speaks it; Write it with Claude rewrites it as a critique, a letter or a prose poem (sign-in for that one button).

Acoustic portrait · curved rooms, focusing, a wave tank & a choir mixing board

1. Pick a place. The page opens in the Dome; choose the Plain box (a comparison room) and press Load this study to hear what a plain room does, then the Rotunda or the Whispering ellipse — each study says what to listen for. The torqued ellipse, double torqued ellipse, spiral, snake and long arc are studies in the manner of curved-steel sculpture, not measured copies of any real piece.
2. Put on headphones and press Play. The four-part chorale is singing in the room: what you hear has been filtered through the simulated path from each singer to your seat, so singers pan by where they stand. The head is a model — a sphere with a shadow and a stand-in for the outer ear — so it gives left–right cues and a crude front–back cue, and no real up–down cue: a reflection from a dome overhead sounds as if it came from ear height.
3. Press B (or the Dry / Room switch) to flip the same mix between the choir dry and in the room. That one switch is the lesson: it is what the room — its shape, its surfaces and its air — adds.
4. Move yourself or a singer: choose Seat 1 or 2, then drag the dot on the plan or use the arrow keys (every step is spoken: how far east or north of the room's centre, and how far from the nearest wall; clock positions from your seat come from the portrait and from asking 'where is the soprano'). Draft is the quickest setting (the Quality picker says roughly how long each takes); High is for the final portrait.
5. Read the plan: the colours are the energy the ROOM adds at ear height, in dB against the room's typical level — bright patches are focus. Switch the time window to 80–200 ms to see where the echoes land, and open Section to watch rays gather under a dome. Dark blue is quiet, muted gold is loud; the numbers are in the table beside it.
6. Open Rays for the caustic itself: a fan of rays from the singer, whose bright envelope is where sound concentrates; scrub the wavefront to watch it focus and spread.
7. Open 3D to see the same facts stood up in the room: orbit the model, with the energy map lying at ear height, the rays bouncing off the real surfaces, each echo ringed on the surface it last came off (cast from your seat along the direction the Echoes table gives), a dome's centre or an ellipse's foci marked from theory, and the singers and seats at their heights facing the way they face. Click a surface to put the selected person there (a wall puts them a foot off it), click a person to select them; the arrow keys work as on the plan, and the whole picture is described in words.
8. Open the Wave tank for what rays cannot show — sound bending round a plate's edge and through a gap, and the standing waves of a round room (a steady tone shows its nodes and bellies). It is a 2-D slice, so read it for pattern, not for decibels.
9. Mix with the board: Tab to the console, then ← → choose a channel, PgUp/PgDn a control, ↑ ↓ turn it (Shift for a fine step; a frequency steps a third of an octave), ? for every key. Shift+← → keeps the control on the next channel, Shift+PgUp/PgDn hops a whole section, W says where you are and D what changed. It all speaks. Voice mode works too — 'mute altos', 'tenor fader minus three', 'what changed'.
10. More ways to look and to change your mind: under Reading the picture, switch on First reflections (from theory) and Reach: who is behind the steel; the Portrait also has Room by channel, Reflection sky, Walk from the focus and How much of the sound is still a mirror image. K keeps the room you have, N flips what you hear between it and the new one, and J says how the two differ. U undoes a change to the board (Shift+U puts it back), = types an exact value for the control you are on, and G jumps to a control by name.
11. Read the Portrait — the same numbers as sentences: reverberation, clarity, echoes with clock-position directions, hot spots, and each closed-form prediction (a focus, a dome return) against what the simulation found.
12. Change the room: size, wall lean and twist, ceiling shape, openings, materials, and surface roughness (scattering breaks a focus up — that is what coffers are for). Import a Rhino model (.3dm, .obj, .gltf/.glb, .stl, .ply; up to 300,000 triangles) to hear your own geometry, then export the impulse response, the mix, the portrait as text, the measurements (CSV), the picture, the room mesh (an OBJ, in feet by default) or the whole project as a file.
13. Keep and send it: Save keeps the room, the people, the whole board and an imported model in your Work (a model too big for a Work save is kept by name — the Save note says so). Share ⧉ → Make a link gives a link a signed-in classmate opens for 90 days; Download the project file (also Export → Project file) needs no sign-in, and Share ⧉ → Open a project file reads one back — old Caustic JSON files too.

move a window, watch the year answer — in the room, in 3D

1. Sign in, then start from the gable demo, another preset, or take Proving Ground's Daylight ↗ hand-off (the massing and its climate arrive with it).
2. The 3D room in the middle IS the result — orbit it. The floor carries the answer and every wall is tagged with the compass direction it faces.
3. Switch the view: Daylight year colours the floor by annual Daylight Autonomy (the amber area is the sDA number); Direct sun colours it by hours of direct sun (the red area is the ASE number); Pen drops the colour for a plain line drawing.
4. Turn on Sun at a moment, pick Dec 21 or Jun 21 and drag the hour — the sun rides its own arc and throws a real patch on the floor through your openings. Same visibility test the year's ASE number counts, run once.
5. Move any lever in the left rail — windows on any wall, a skylight, a head height, an overhang depth — and the whole year re-simulates. Hovering an aperture card turns that glass amber in the room.
6. Read the four numbers against LM-83's own bands: the tick on each bar is the published threshold (sDA 55% accepted, ASE 10% allowance).
7. Load a different climate (.epw) to see the same room under another sky — the sun-path arcs redraw for its latitude.
8. Read the Blind spots panel for what these numbers miss, ask for A second reading in words, or Make a tactile plate of the plan.

Compare schemes · one weighted table

1. Name your schemes — A, B, C — and add the metrics you actually care about, each with its units and direction.
2. Fill every cell: Read my trace pulls numbers you already produced, a tool's Send to Scoreboard pipe fills a column, or Paste values by hand.
3. Say where each number came from — Scoreboard measures nothing itself, and a cell knows whether it was measured, piped or guessed.
4. Open Weights and say what matters in your own numbers, with one line of reasoning per weight. That argument is the deliverable.
5. Read the ranking (scores are min–max normalized), then the flip test: which single weight change would flip the winner — if it's a small one, you don't have a result yet.
6. Export the plate as PNG or SVG (straight into Graphics), the CSV, or the board JSON to carry the argument forward.

Code, sun, and what fits inside

1. Pick a parcel from the shelf or Draw your own on the grid, then tag which edges face the street — corner lots take two.
2. Pick a teaching district: its setbacks, height cap, sky-exposure planes and FAR are all on screen and all editable, so you can argue with the rule rather than just obey it.
3. Watch the envelope carve one rule at a time — setbacks, then the height cap, then each sky-exposure plane — with Next rule → stepping through so you see what each rule actually costs.
4. Fill it: floor-to-floor, plate shape, corridor type, core size and position. Read gross floor area, FAR used, NSF/GSF efficiency and core ratio.
5. Read Which rule binds — the one that is actually holding your building down. It is usually not the one you expected.
6. Export the bulk envelope (OBJ or Rhino .3dm), the plate schedule CSV, the section + plan SVG, or Send to Scoreboard.

get the code and zoning numbers a scheme must meet, each chained to its clause

1. Set the lot (width, depth, your floor-to-floor) and pick a district. The four teaching districts are Stack's — INVENTED, and every number from them reads ⚠. To read a real ordinance, add My district and transcribe it: one number, one clause citation, and tick the box only once you have read the clause — that is what turns ? into ✓.
2. List the spaces on the story you are checking — name, function of space, floor area. The occupant load per space (area ÷ the Table 1004.5 factor, rounded up) and the story total appear at once; fixed seating takes a seat count instead.
3. Set the story's occupancy group, whether it is sprinklered (and has a voice/alarm system), and enter what you can measure on your own plan: the overall diagonal, the longest travel distance, the longest common path. The sheet grades each against its limit and says FAILS when it fails.
4. Read the sheet: every row is either a LOOKUP (a rule record — hover or focus it for the clause, the paraphrase, who verified it, and the link) or COMPUTED (hover for the arithmetic). A computed number is never more certain than the clauses under it.
5. Read the zoning envelope: footprint after setbacks vs. after coverage, the FAR budget as floors, floors by height, and WHICH RULE BINDS. The plan and section beside the sheet draw the same numbers.
6. Sign in for the Examiner desk: Explain walks the sheet in plan-review order; Ask answers a question by citing rule ids from the pack or abstaining (a citation the pack does not carry is flagged, never hidden); Serve objections plays the code official and tells you what to dimension next.
7. Export the verification worksheet CSV — one row per finding with every clause and a column for your own check — or the scheme JSON to re-open it. The deliverable is the checking, not the answer: NOT A LEGAL DETERMINATION.

turn the sun into kilowatt-hours

1. Load an EPW weather file — no climate, no kilowatt-hours. (Surveyor's site pipe hands one over; Pick a site in Surveyor → if you don't have one.)
2. Pick a massing — box, L, courtyard, gable or tower — and set its dimensions.
3. Select a face to open its cell grid, then paint PV zones on roof and façade; Fill face and Clear face do it wholesale.
4. Set each zone's module type (including BIPV), mounting (flush or racked), tilt, azimuth and packing.
5. Read the yield: annual kWh, specific yield in kWh/kWp, the monthly profile, and the self-shading cost against an unshaded-by-construction baseline.
6. Open the orientation sweep to see what tilt and azimuth are worth on this site, against the site optimum and a vertical south wall.
7. Pick your eGRID subregion — there's deliberately no default — for the avoided-carbon line, then export the zone schedule or monthly profile as CSV.

reason one decision, with the math shown

1. Sign in, then start from the seed decision — a south room with an overhang — and work one move at a time.
2. Pull a Lever and the closed-form solar geometry answers immediately; Show the math to read the actual working, not a summary.
3. Read Consequences (live) beside it, with the precedent the number comes from.
4. Write your reasoning and Add this move to the Tape — the Tape is the record of the decisions and the why behind each one, which is the thing worth handing in.
5. Changed my mind reopens a move; Print the Tape, or export the geometry as .3dm mesh or a Rhino Python script.

read an assembly's embodied carbon by magnitude

1. Pick an assembly kind — wall, roof or floor — then a preset assembly, or stack your own layers exterior → interior.
2. The needle answers as you build: kgCO2e/m² against the ~10 · ~50 · ~100 · ~500 ladder, so you learn the order of magnitude, not a false precision.
3. Read the credible band around it, and the biogenic line kept separate — stored carbon is not avoided emissions and the tool refuses to add them together.
4. Open the layer breakdown to see which single layer is carrying the number, then swap materials and watch it move.
5. Optional: Propose your own swap and ask the coach to argue it with you (sign-in — that step spends an AI call). Export the assembly JSON or the layer breakdown CSV.

somebody says it would be greener to knock it down

1. Set the barn that is standing — diameter, cow storey, mow studs, silo — or leave Fraser's 60-footer as it is.
2. Triage it element by element: KEEP costs nothing, STRIP buys a like-for-like replacement, DEMOLISH buys nothing back and the tool tells you what you just gave up.
3. Read the two curves against each other — Reuse + retrofit vs Demolish + rebuild, cumulative carbon 2026–2126.
4. Read the crossover year: how long the new building takes to pay back its own construction out of lower running costs. Some schemes never cross.
5. Then argue with it. Move the retrofit and new-build energy sliders — they decide the answer, and they are assumptions, not measurements. What this number does not see is spelled out on the page.

Wind through a plan & over a massing · potential flow, not CFD

1. On the Plan tab, draw walls and drag openings along them — or take a preset (opposite windows, adjacent windows, L-plan, courtyard) to see the classic cases.
2. Set the wind speed and direction and read where cross-ventilation actually works and where the plan starves.
3. On the Site tab, press → Draughts in Eco-Architect to send a real massing, terrain and EPW wind over — or use the demo massing.
4. Pick a compass direction (each of the 16 is its own voxel solve), then read the streamlines, the pedestrian-level speed slice and the speedup / shelter numbers.
5. Read the methods note first, and mean it: this is potential flow, so there are no wakes and no turbulence. Patterns are indicative, never predictive.

Comfort & passive strategies

1. Drag the State point, or type a dry-bulb temperature and relative humidity — a climate preset (hot-humid, hot-dry, cold, comfort…) gets you started.
2. Read what that one point implies: humidity ratio, dew point, wet-bulb and enthalpy, with a crosshair to the axes.
3. Turn on Strategy zones to see which passive strategies (after Givoni) reach comfort from where you are — and which don't.
4. Export SVG or PNG. For a whole climate at once rather than one point, open Almanac.

cast real shadows on a date

1. Set the Place (or type latitude, longitude and UTC offset), then the Date and Time of day.
2. Pick a Massing — Tower, Courtyard, Campus or Demo — or Import model to cast shadows on your own .3dm, .obj, .stl or .ply.
3. Read altitude, azimuth, sunrise and sunset while the shadows move; turn on the Sun-path arc for the day and the ground grid for scale.
4. Jump to the solstices and equinoxes with the Jun sol / Dec sol / Mar eq / Sep eq buttons — the four days worth checking.
5. ▶ Animate the day to run sunrise → sunset, and Save screenshot (PNG) for the sheet.

carve the buildable mass sunlight law allows

1. Set the site — width E–W, depth N–S — and the Latitude you're building at.
2. Choose the Sun window to protect: the season (Winter / Equinox / Summer) and the hours, e.g. 09:00 to 15:00.
3. The envelope is the largest volume that never shadows a neighbour during that window — tallest in the middle, sloping to the edges.
4. Raise Resolution for a finer carve, and switch Smooth surface vs. stepped depending on whether you want the idea or the terraces.
5. Orbit it, then export OBJ to Rhino or PNG for the sheet.

Shading study · louvers, fins, eggcrate over one window

1. Set the window (width × height and sill), the façade azimuth and the latitude.
2. Pick a device family — horizontal blades, vertical fins, or eggcrate — then dial depth, spacing, count and blade angle.
3. Scrub the sun-hour slider and watch the shadow sweep the glass, while the shading mask paints over the sun-path arcs behind it.
4. Read the trade you are actually making: winter sun kept, summer sun cut, and openness (how much sky and view you spent to get there).
5. Export the cut sheet SVG at true size, the mask chart PNG, or the design JSON to come back to it.

Floor & deck framing · bending/shear/deflection

1. Set the target clear span in feet, the lumber species and grade, and the spacing.
2. Pick the use case — interior floor, exterior deck, or custom dead and live loads in psf — and the deflection target (L/240, L/360, L/480).
3. Read the whole table at once: every standard size against every spacing, PASS or FAIL, with the maximum clear span in each cell.
4. Open a selected joist to see all four checks — bending, shear, live-load deflection, total-load deflection — and which one governs. The governing check is the lesson; it changes with span.
5. Learn the method shows the actual formulas and the adjustment factors being applied. Export CSV, or Print / Save PDF for the set.

Visibility / viewshed analysis

1. Draw the plan: Add wall (drag) for lines, Add rectangle (drag) for blocks; Delete last and Clear fix mistakes.
2. Switch to Move viewpoint and drop the eye — the isovist polygon is everything visible from that spot.
3. Read the metrics beside it: visible area, perimeter, visible corners, compactness and drift (how far the view pulls away from where you stand).
4. Turn on Show sight rays and Mark visible corners to see how the polygon is built, and set the scale in pixels per metre so the area means something.
5. Move the viewpoint around the plan to compare positions, then export SVG or PNG.

write the charter before any geometry exists

1. Write the charter first — Title, Program, and Ambitions — before any geometry exists. No account needed.
2. Open the site-forces deck and take a move from it: the deck supplies the metric and a target, so the goal is testable rather than a wish.
3. Or Add a goal by hand: pick the metric, the operator (≥, ≤, =) and the target value; each goal keeps its provenance so you can see where the number came from.
4. Send to Eco-Architect, or export Eco goals JSON — it's Eco-Architect's own goals format, so the charter travels with the design instead of being restated.
5. Brief JSON saves the whole charter for later.

1. Sign in, then stock Your jury pool: put house critics in your roster, Build a new critic from a description, or Bring a real desk crit and let the AI draft a critic's spec from the transcript.
2. Tune any critic — Stance, Pet peeves, What earns its respect, Questions it would ask — and read Exactly what the model is told, so nothing about the persona is hidden from you.
3. Convene a jury of two or more critics on your work; read the Blind spots and the crit weather report rather than a grade.
4. Coach this critic after a real review — mark what held up and what didn't, and the standing rules carry into the next crit.
5. Under Review Prep, work the thesis, the drawing order and the questions the jury will ask; Rehearse a rebuttal against your own words.
6. Export the Critique as Markdown or a print view (PDF), your statement as accessible HTML, and the roster as JSON so it moves between projects.

1. Sign in, then pull your tagged claims onto the board — Surveyor and Librarian hand them over, or Add a claim by hand.
2. Set each claim's status as you test it, so the board tracks what you actually still believe.
3. Ask for a tension: the Editor pairs two claims that can't both win and writes the line saying why — Adopt this tension to keep it, or ask again.
4. The Editor abstains rather than inventing a conflict when the evidence doesn't support one — an empty answer is a real answer.
5. Load the worked example to see a finished board, then send the story to Critic to have it falsified.

bounce a theory idea and walk away with a reading trail

1. Sign in and bring an idea — a position you're forming, a passage you're wrestling with, or a hunch you can't yet defend. State it plainly; the Interlocutor engages the argument, not you.
2. Optionally pick a Persona above the chat — who's arguing with you. Six house voices ship (The Historian, The Materialist, The Phenomenologist, The Formalist, The Postcolonial Critic, The Pragmatist); Manage personas lets you tune any of them or build your own, described in your own words with AI drafting the spec.
3. Pick the turn's stance: SITUATE places the idea in the discourse (lineages, allies, opponents, key texts), PRESS steelmans the strongest case against it, EXPAND opens adjacent debates and unexpected company. Persona and stance compose — who's talking, and what kind of turn this is.
4. Read the reply as a colleague's take, not a verdict — it names the thinker AND the work, corrects misattributions, and ends on the tension your idea now has to answer.
5. Watch the Reading Trail on the right: every work the conversation leans on collects there across turns, tagged WEB-CONFIRMED (a search this session verified it exists as cited) or VERIFY (model memory — a lead to chase, never a citation to paste).
6. Sources opened lists the web pages it actually read while checking itself, each link probed live; follow them rather than stopping at the reply.
7. Copy list exports the trail as text — recall items carry their verify-before-citing warning into the export, so the honesty travels with the list.

get honest marks on a draft you already wrote

1. Sign in and paste your own draft — the tool marks what you wrote, so there has to be a draft first.
2. Red pen: line-level marks for wordiness, passive voice, jargon, hedges and sentences doing two jobs, each with a one-sentence tightening nudge — never a rewritten paragraph. Fix them yourself in the draft; nothing here auto-applies.
3. Argument X-ray: reads what each paragraph claims and whether it advances your stated thesis — and says plainly if it can't find a thesis at all, which is a sign to visit the Editor before the Copyeditor.
4. Citation check: web-verifies every attribution and quotation you made against a live search, tagging each WEB-CONFIRMED or VERIFY — from memory (misattributed if the search shows it belongs to someone else).
5. Voice check: flags passages whose register jumps against the rest of the draft — the tell of pasted-in text or losing your own voice partway through. Zero flags is a real, common result.
6. Chat: talk the draft through with the same editor — what a paragraph is doing, whether a cut breaks the argument, which of two orders lands harder. It quotes your words back and will not write a sentence for you, and it has NO web access, so anything it says about a source is memory (Citation check is the pass that searches).
7. Editors: pick who holds the pen. Six house editors ship with the tool and any of them can be tuned; build your own from blank, describe your professor and let the AI draft the spec, or paste the feedback you were actually given on a paper and have that editor extracted from it. The editor you choose colours all four passes AND the chat, and the tab shows you the exact prompt fragment it becomes.
8. Run any pass as many times as you like as you revise — each is a fresh read of whatever is currently in the box.

1. Sign in, then pick the software you're stuck in — Rhino, Grasshopper, AutoCAD, Revit or Adobe.
2. Set your Level so the answer arrives at the right height, and ask in your own words. Attach a screenshot, a PDF, or a .3dm / .gh / .ghx file when showing beats describing.
3. Read the answer with its In context panel and Learn more → links into the official docs — the point is that you can check it.
4. Follow Further ideas to the next move, and pair it with the Skills Map to see where this step sits in the whole ladder.
5. New chat starts clean when you switch to an unrelated problem.

forge the instrument you wish existed

1. Sign in, then describe the parametric instrument you wish existed, in one line plus as much detail as you like.
2. Forge it — Claude writes its build() program on Conjure's fenced rails, and picks the sliders the instrument should expose.
3. Play the instrument: move its sliders and watch the model rebuild. Read How Claude wrote this to see the reasoning, and the code itself read-only beside it.
4. Make it yours — edit the code and Re-run my code — or Steer it with another instruction. Revert puts back the last working version.
5. Keep it in your library, Fork to my library from someone else's, or Publish to the studio so the cohort can use it.
6. Export the instrument JSON or a RhinoPython script (.py), or load a worked example first to see the shape of a good one (no AI call).

1. Open the trail map of 2D and 3D skills, beginner → advanced, and filter by software or track.
2. Click a node to read that step: what it is, its prerequisites, the key moves, and what to watch out for.
3. Take it to Coach → from any node to get tutored on that exact step, and come back to the map to see what it unlocks.
4. For Grasshopper specifically, read The Grasshopper Manual behind the map — contents, key concepts, a component index by tab, a cookbook, a data-trees deep dive, a plugin shortlist, and a troubleshooting table by symptom → cause → fix.
5. Video walkthroughs are attached to steps as they're recorded; the written step stands on its own until then.

the map of 3D geometry skills — what each one IS, in Rhino terms, with live demos

1. Read the map: nine domains, every skill visible at once. The numeral on each row is its tier — 1 Foundation, 2 Working, 3 Advanced — and the tier filter narrows the map to one level.
2. Click a skill to open its entry: the definition (the geometric fact, stated once), where it earns its keep in the studio, and the Rhino vocabulary that operates on it.
3. Follow the toolkit cross-links — each entry names the tools that exercise that skill (Sectionist for the plane section, Panelizer for curvature classes, Plumb for topology diagnostics).
4. Rows marked DEMO carry a live model. Orthographic projection / True length: a gable prism inside three projection planes, an unfold control that lays them flat as a third-angle sheet, and a per-edge table of true length against the three projected lengths in ft-in.
5. Views underdetermine form: reconstruct a solid from three target silhouettes, editing 4 ft blocks layer by layer in plan with the per-view match reading continuously — then compare your block count against the reference and the maximal consistent solid.
6. Single-view ambiguity: an open chain of three bars whose ends coincide only when the view runs down the space diagonal; orbit and read the off-axis angle against the real separation.
7. Export the taxonomy as a CSV checklist, or the demo geometry as .3dm in feet. Save (signed in) keeps your place and the demo bench.

see how people have answered a climate like yours with the materials to hand — and measure why it worked

1. Three books, switched at the top of the rail: TRADITIONS is the atlas; TECHNIQUES is the fifteen passive principles the traditions are made of; LESSONS walks the two in order. The first two cross-link — an entry lists the techniques it uses, a technique lists the traditions that use it, and a click opens the other book.
2. Start with the Lessons book's first lesson, How to read this atlas; each lesson's stops set the drawing for you, say what to look at and what it shows, and end in a studio exercise (export it as a handout).
3. Open with the iglu, or pick any tradition in the rail or on the map (zoom, drag, or jump to a region) — filter the sixty-four by climate, material, structure and standing, or type a people or a place. The Line-up tab stands all of them in view at one scale.
4. Read the entry beside the drawing: who builds it and where, WHY it works in its weather, HOW it is built in order, the numbers (hover any one for its source), the lesson a studio takes from it, its standing, its sources, the passive techniques it uses, and GO FURTHER — links to reading, film, places, drawings and how-to.
5. Switch the viewport: MAP puts every tradition on the world with the tropics and polar circles drawn; SECTION is the entry drawn to scale — the cut material hatched, arrows for the air and the sun, the things that make it work marked with small numbered tags whose notes are in the key beside the drawing (point at a note to light its tag), a height dimension, the 6 ft figure, the 10 ft bar; COMPARE draws it and a second tradition on one sheet at ONE scale, a tag on each naming it and its size.
6. In the TECHNIQUES book, filter by family (keep the heat · shed the heat · stand in the weather) and read the principle: the physics, the numbers, where it works and stops, how to design with it. DIAGRAM draws the principle in a generic room, in feet; MAP pins the traditions that use it.
7. Open MASS & LAG and press “Use this tradition's wall”, then move the thickness and the outdoor swing: time lag, decrement, the swing at the inside face and the R-value answer live, with the 24-hour wave and the damping depth drawn. Every readout says its method on hover.
8. Under A CLIMATE LIKE YOURS, type your site (a place or a coordinate). The tool reads a full weather year there and ranks the traditions built against the same forces — and fills the bench's swing with the site's real day–night range.
9. Export the section, the technique diagram or the compare sheet as SVG (feet, to scale, with the hatches), the atlas or the techniques as CSV, or the study as shelter.json; Save keeps your place in your Work.

budget a firm and a fee — and see who eats the overrun under each contract

1. Start on OFFICE. Pick a firm shape — sole practitioner, small studio, mid-size studio-based, large departmental — and read the roster it deals: head count, salary and utilization per role. Every one is a slider.
2. Read the chain on the sheet: direct labor is the salary charged to jobs, everything else is overhead; the overhead rate and break-even multiplier follow, and the profit target turns break-even into the net multiplier that prices every hour. Hover any number for its method.
3. Pick a legal entity and compare the owner's take: the same profit lands differently under a sole proprietorship, an LLC, an S election and a C corporation. The tax rates are inputs — check them against the year.
4. Switch to PROJECT. Choose a building type (cost per square foot and a teaching fee percentage come with it), a delivery method, and a compensation basis. Consultants come off the top; what is left has to buy the hours at your net multiplier — press Plan hours to the fee to budget top-down.
5. Add an overrun — 25% more hours, landed on CA or spread across the phases — and read the comparison table: under a lump sum the firm pays, under hourly the client pays, a cap shares it, cost-plus leaks if the multiplier sits under break-even, and IPD reimburses the cost but risks the profit pool.
6. Switch to CASH FLOW. Set the retainer and the payment lag the delivery method implies and read the trough: that negative number is the line of credit a profitable project still needs. Export any ledger as CSV, or Save the whole study to your Work.

Snippet gallery + AI edit

1. Search the gallery — more than a hundred RhinoPython and GhPython snippets for real studio moves: panelise a surface, contour a Brep, Make2D a view, unroll a developable, drape onto terrain, sun vectors, GFA and FAR from floor plates.
2. Open a snippet to read the full code with its inputs and outputs; GhPython entries name the component inputs and their access (item / list / tree).
3. Copy code and run it as-is in Rhino's EditPythonScript, or paste it into a GhPython component.
4. Edit with AI in the console to bend a snippet to your model, or Walk me through the code when you want the why rather than the what.
5. Make your own snippet and Add to gallery to keep the moves you work out. Pair it with Coach for the concepts behind them.

you know what you're trying to do but not which tool does it

1. Sign in, then type what you're working on in your own words, for example: "I need my section drawing to read by touch." Press Enter.
2. Read the answer: one to three tools, best first, each with why it fits and its first step. The tool names are links.
3. Ask a follow-up such as "how do I use that one?" to get that tool's own step-by-step.
4. If Ask Prof says no tool does that yet, your question is saved as a gap for the people who build the toolkit. After ten questions, choose Start over.

1. Open Process to see the whole toolkit as one design process, Brief → Critique.
2. Click a phase on the spine to deal that phase's tools as a deck — keystones first, instruments compact underneath.
3. Switch the framing: Loop reads design as a cycle you re-enter, Guided lays the same phases out as a numbered first-year path.
4. Signed in, pick an active Work in the header and Save a version at each phase, so one project carries across every tool.

1. Sign in — the wall reads and writes your own rows, so it needs a studio account.
2. Upload an image with a Title (required), and add Project, comma-separated Tags and Notes — crit feedback, context, whatever you'll want to remember.
3. The wall shows the 60 most recent pins, newest first; each card carries its title, project and tags.
4. You can remove your own pins; other people's stay. Images are served over expiring signed links, not public URLs.
5. For a CLASS wall, open your class’s Archivist: the demo is a sandbox open to everyone, and ARCH 273 and ARCH 371 carry their real rosters and calendars. Browsing a wall needs no account.
6. On any board, turn on PICK SHEETS and click cells, then PIAF PROCESS for one black-and-white PDF — or press a single column's PDF button to take that whole class day.

Its pages: Demo wall · ARCH 273 wall · ARCH 371 wall · Tactile Library · Atlas References

1. Sign in as the teacher and create a drop, choosing its kind: Print (11×17 photo sheets), Slideshow (photos + video), or Booklet (students download a PDF).
2. Show the drop's QR code or short link on the projector — students scan and drop photos or videos with no account and no app.
3. Watch them land in the Gallery; sort by upload order or by the photos' own dates, and select which ones the show uses.
4. Then Print sheets, Play slideshow (720p/1080p, seconds-per-image set by you), or open the booklet PDF.
5. Create a view-only link to share the drop with a co-teacher or a critic without giving them upload rights; disable it whenever you like.

1. Sign in — the Dossier is your own trace, visible only to you.
2. Every run of every AI tool lands here automatically: which tool, when, and what it was asked.
3. Filter by tool or by date range, or switch to By day to see the studio rhythm.
4. Print / save as PDF for a review, or Download Markdown / JSON to keep the record outside the toolkit.

turn a pile of recipes into a week, a list and a price

1. Eaters: set the table — who eats, their ages (portions scale by age), what they won't eat, allergies, weeknight minutes, and the week's budget.
2. Recipes: import from a link (free — it reads the page's own structured data), from a photo of a recipe card (AI), or from a paste; or write one by hand. Restore starter box gets you a full box immediately.
3. Week: pick a start date and plan it. Every night shows why it landed there — time, variety, shared ingredients, cost and predicted yumminess — and you can Pin a different dish over any choice.
4. Stores: search your ZIP for real grocery stores and pick one, so the list is priced at that chain's index instead of a national average.
5. Shopping: work the merged, aisle-ordered list, then export it as Markdown or CSV.
6. Afterwards, rate what you actually cooked — a real rating replaces the predicted yumminess — and log each new-food tasting, with a line for what to say when the new food goes down.