A Tour of the Editor
Use the Kapy editor to draw a profile on a plane and turn it into a solid you can print. Open a document and you get five regions: a 3D viewport, a strip of tools across the top, a narrow column down the left edge, a status line along the bottom, and a column of icons at the right edge that opens when you point at it. There are no dozens of docked panels and no ribbon with eleven tabs.
One rule explains the emptiness: the editor shows you the tools your current selection makes possible, and hides the rest. Learn it and you can predict where a tool will be instead of memorising the interface.
The one rule: your selection drives the toolbar
Click nothing and the toolbar is nearly bare: start a sketch, insert an object, import a file. There is no Fillet button, because there is no edge to fillet.
Click a face and the toolbar refills: sketch on this face, push or pull it, offset it, hollow the body it belongs to. Click an edge instead and a different set arrives, fillet and chamfer, the two operations that need edges. Double-click to take the whole body and you get patterns, mirror and the transform stack. Select a second body as well and the booleans appear, because a boolean needs two.
Watch the colour of the part across those two pictures. The moment anything is selected, Kapy desaturates every body to a neutral grey so the blue of the selection reads against it. Nothing was recoloured. Deselect and the palette comes back.
So when a tool is missing, check your selection before you hunt the toolbar. The button is where it always is, and what changed is that nothing on screen is an edge. Select one and it appears. Kapy does not grey tools out, it leaves them out, and the radial menu is built the same way: it only ever offers what your selection makes possible. As you will see in Keyboard shortcuts, that is also why a single letter can safely mean two different tools.
The regions of the screen
The viewport
The whole middle of the window is the model. Orbit with the right mouse button, pan with the middle one, zoom with the wheel. Hover highlights what you are about to pick, and a click takes it. Pick everything you build here, in the model itself, rather than from a tree of names.
The toolbar
The toolbar is the strip across the top. It is grouped by what the tools do (sketch creation, bodies, booleans, references, patterns, transforms) and each group appears only when the current selection makes it usable. A caret on a button means related variants hide behind it: three ways to draw a rectangle, four kinds of gear.
Reach the same tools in the viewport instead: right-click and the radial menu opens where the cursor is, offering what your selection makes possible, grouped in coloured sectors. You get one icon, one name and one behaviour whether you take a tool from the toolbar or from the radial.
There is no second, list-shaped context menu: right-click is the radial. What separates the two jobs of that one button is click versus drag. A quick press and release opens the radial. Anything longer, or with movement, orbits the camera.
The timeline
The narrow strip down the left edge, under the logo, is your document's history: one chip per operation stacked top to bottom, in the order you built them, from the first sketch to the last fillet. Click a chip to edit that operation and everything after it rebuilds on the new value. It belongs to Design, so leaving for Media or Print takes the strip with it. The timeline is what makes the model parametric, and it gets a section of its own later in this track.
The tool windows
At the top right there is a column of icons rather than a panel. Point at one and its window slides out. Move away and it collapses again. Which ones are there depends on what you are doing:
| Window | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Bodies | Every solid in the document: rename, recolour, hide, pick the active one |
| Sketches | The same, for sketches |
| Constraints | The constraints on the sketch you are editing (in a sketch only) |
| Parameters | Every named value in the document, its expression and how many times it is used |
| Smart objects | The catalog you place holes, inserts, hinges and textures from |
| View | Viewport helpers: axes, grid, labels |
Consult these windows, then go back to the viewport. The work happens there.
The status bar
The status bar runs along the very bottom. It reports whether anything is being computed right now, and whether your document is saved. It also carries a live measurement of your selection. Pick one edge and its length is there. Pick two faces and you get the angle between them. There is no separate measure tool to enter and leave.
The setup chip
Top right of the header sits your Active Setup: printer, nozzle, quality and material. It is not part of the document. It is what you are printing on, and it feeds the clearances a smart object uses so a hole fits your machine rather than a generic one. It is covered with the rest of the printer setup.
Sketch mode is a different room
Enter a sketch and the toolbar is replaced wholesale: shapes, curves, inserts, and, as soon as you select something, constraints and dimensions. The 3D tools are gone, because none of them apply to a 2D drawing.
Learn to spot that swap. If the toolbar is showing you circles and arcs, you are in a sketch, and anything you click applies to the drawing rather than to the solid. Finish sketch takes you back.
The loop, in twenty seconds
Build nearly every part by repeating one loop: pick a plane, draw, turn the drawing into a solid, then modify that solid. Here is the whole thing at its smallest, a plane, a rectangle, an extrude:
The studio modes
Switch the whole editor between modes with the selector in the header. Design is where modelling happens, and it is what this track covers. Media sits beside it and is open to everyone: spec pages and short clips of a part. Analyze and Print are not open yet. They will be, and this track will grow with them.
See also
- Selecting and Navigating: how to pick the thing you are pointing at
- Keyboard Shortcuts: the letters, once the toolbar has taught you where they live
- Creating a Sketch: the first thing to build