Pick a generator. Cut it.

The 15-second version

Click the purple ✨ GEN's button in the top bar. Pick a generator tab — wing, gear, ambigram, characters, wall panel, hypar or helical flight — fill in a few numbers, and hit Generate. The shape appears in the workspace, framed in your cutter, ready to rescale, reposition, download or stream. It runs entirely in your browser: instant, repeatable, and works offline.

What it can make today

🪽 NACA wings & morphs

The classic recipe for RC plane wings, built from NACA 4-digit aerofoils (e.g. 2412 = 2% camber at 40% chord, 12% thick; 0009 = symmetric, 9% thick). Set a root aerofoil, an optional different tip aerofoil, root and tip chords for taper, the span, plus sweep and washout. The tool cuts it as a 4-wire ruled-surface morph that smoothly blends root to tip — a tapered, twisting aerofoil that used to need CAD or hand-cut templates.

• Straight wing: same tip chord as root, sweep 0.
• Tapered + blended: 2412 root → 2409 tip, 200 mm → 140 mm chord.
• Washout twists the tip down a couple of degrees for gentle stalls.

⚙ Gears

A true involute gear — the correct tooth profile, not a decorative approximation. Spur gears cut flat on a 2-wire machine; helical (twisted teeth) and bevel (tapered/conical) gears use a 4-wire morph, and helical bevel uses both. Set module, tooth count, pressure angle, centre bore and a solid / spoked / lightening-hole web. Enclosed features (the bore, spokes, holes) are auto-slit to the edge, because a hot wire can't cut an enclosed hole.

🔁 Ambigrams

Two words set 90° apart on a platform, so you read one word from the front and the other from the side. The cut spins the foam 90° between the two words — it needs the rotation axis, so it switches your machine to 5-axis automatically. Short, chunky words (3–5 letters) read best; letter holes (O, A, P) are auto-slit so the wire can reach them.

🔤 Characters & lettering

Loose letters, numbers or symbols — up to 10 — cut as a single continuous outline. The glyphs float free, joined only by a thin horizontal mid-line so the whole row cuts as one contour (snap it off afterwards to free each letter). Mainly a 2-wire flat cut for signage; enclosed holes (O, A, 8, &, #) are auto-slit to the edge. On a 4-wire machine you can slant or taper it afterwards.

🌊 Wall panels

A flowing decorative panel whose front face morphs from one sine wave to another across its width — a ruled surface, so a 4-wire hot wire cuts it in one clean pass. Set height, width, base thickness, and the amplitude / wave-count for each side. Whole-number wave counts make panels tile seamlessly edge-to-edge. Great for feature walls, ceiling baffles, headboards and signage backdrops.

⌓ Hypars (saddles)

A hyperbolic paraboloid — the classic architectural saddle. It looks impossibly curved, yet it's made entirely of straight lines, so a 4-wire hot wire cuts it flawlessly in a single pass. Two opposite corners rise, two stay low. Use it as a positive mould for thin-shell concrete roofs, plaster or composite shells, and sculptural forms.

🧬 Helical flights (auger ribbons) β

The shaftless spiral ribbon of an auger / Archimedes screw — no central shaft. Set outer Ø, bore Ø, pitch, number of turns, flight thickness and hand. It's cut on the rotary axis as two offset helicoid passes (the two faces of the ribbon), with the waste between turns lifting away. The preview shows the finished flight as a solid. β: the toolpath + machine-axis mapping still want validating on a real rig.

How it actually works (under the hood)

There's no large language model behind this. Each generator is a small procedural recipe — hand-written code that knows the math for its shape family — and it runs in your browser, not on a server. When you press Generate it builds the profile(s) and hands them to the same engine that powers the rest of the tool:

• Ruled-surface morphs (wings, helical/bevel gears, wall panels, hypars) build two end profiles and loft a 4-wire morph between them.
• Flat cuts (spur gears, characters) trace a single profile on a 2-wire path.
• Rotary cuts (ambigrams, helical flights) drive the A rotation axis for indexed or synchronised multi-side cuts.

Because the math is local and deterministic, it's instant (no round-trip), repeatable (same inputs → same shape), and works offline — no third-party API, no per-request cost, no rate limit on generating. It can only make shapes inside the recipe set; for anything else, load an SVG / DXF / G-code, or ask for a new generator on the helpdesk.

What you can do with the output

A generated shape behaves exactly like any other loaded part:

• Scale it with the SCALE X/Y/U/V inputs (the % ↔ mm toggle lets you type real dimensions).
• Position it inside the material block with the OFFSET FROM 0,0 fields.
• Rotate / twist a face (4-wire morph) via the ROTATE UV input.
• Download the G-code with ↓ G-code, or stream it over USB-Serial or Wi-Fi — in whatever axis format your controller expects (Settings → Controller / G-code format).
• Share & save it with one click — and signed-in makers also get it added to the shape library automatically, where others can Load, Remix or Fork it.

Tips & limits

• Sensible defaults. Every generator opens pre-filled, so you can just hit Generate and tweak afterwards.
• Millimetres throughout. No inch input yet — everything is mm.
• It's framed in your cutter. Each shape is sized to fit your machine envelope and centred; rescale in the OBJECT bar if you want it bigger or smaller.
• A hot wire can't cut enclosed holes, so bores, letter counters and lightening holes are auto-slit to the nearest edge.
• Helical flight is β — validate the A-axis G-code on your rig before cutting real foam.

Coming next

• Maturing 3/5-axis rotation cuts — the rotary (A-axis) path that ambigrams and helical flights ride is still being hardened against real hardware.
• More generators — spirals, scrolls, fluted columns done the right way (voxel foam-state engine), prop fairings, NACA 5-digit / 6-series.
• Multi-language fields so non-English makers don't have to translate first.

Questions, requests, weird results?

Hit the helpdesk's generator category — there's a growing collection of common questions and gotchas. If yours isn't there, post it. We read every one.