What a Smart Object Is

6 min readUpdated Aug 2026

Use a smart object to replay modelling you have already done onto a new part: hover the SmartObjects icon in the column at the top right of the viewport, pick a tile, and click on a face. The object's numbers stay editable after it lands.

You have modelled a captive nut pocket once. Now you need it on four brackets, and next month on a fifth part in a different file. Drawing it again each time is where the errors come from: one pocket ends up a couple of tenths tighter than the others and only the print tells you. Saved as a smart object, that pocket is one tile away in every document you open afterwards.

A cam somebody else modelled, dropped onto a plate. Its parameters are yours to change; its modelling is not yours to redo.

What one actually does to your model

There are four kinds, and they behave differently enough that it is worth knowing which you are holding before you drop it.

A face pipeline object carries a sketch and a short list of steps, and replays them against a flat face you point at. The result changes the host part: a pocket really is cut into your bracket. Most fixtures and cutouts are this kind, and it is the only kind with positioning dimensions.

An object is a whole model inserted into your document as new bodies. It needs no host face. Drop it in and you have a second thing sitting next to the first, which is what you want for a fastener, a bearing or a part someone else designed.

A code-on-region object runs authored code against a flat face, or against a sketch region drawn on one. Surface textures are the common case: a pattern computed across an area rather than drawn by hand.

A code-on-body object runs code against a whole solid you pick, and the result replaces that body. Nothing is added alongside it. Point one at a body you care about and the body you get back is the object's output.

Only face pipelines need a host face, and they are the only kind that carries a reference cube and a base sketch. A saved object that does not say what it attaches to is treated as a face pipeline.

Nothing in the picker announces which kind a tile is, so the reliable way to find out is to watch what happens when you pick it: a ghost on the cursor means an object or a face pipeline, an immediate result means a fill texture or a single-body code object, and a prompt to pick something means the rest. The kind also matters when you swap one placement for another. While a placed item is open in the timeline, the picker only offers objects of the same kind, because those are the only ones that can fill the slot.

Where they come from

There is no built-in catalog. Older documentation describes a shelf of ready-made objects that shipped with the app. That shelf was removed and none of those objects exist. Objects now come from exactly two places:

Ones you made. Anything you authored, imported or saved into your own library.
The store. Published listings from other people, approved before they appear.

The picker splits those into three sections, Your smart objects, Saved from store and From the store, but there are still only two sources. "Add to my library" moves a store object from the third section into the second. It changes nothing about the object itself, and you do not have to save a store object before placing it.

Browsing the store on the site, including any individual listing page, needs no login at all.

What costs money

Consuming objects is free. Placing them, searching, saving one to your library, editing the parameters of one you have placed, choosing which version to use: all of it comes with a free account. You do need to be signed in, because the editor and the three picker feeds sit behind a login, but a free account is enough.

Creating your own is the Maker feature. Making a new smart object, importing one, duplicating one, or saving code for one is what a paid plan buys, and those actions answer with an upgrade prompt rather than a refusal you have to decode.

Publishing is not the wall. Sending a finished object to the store costs nothing beyond being signed in, so a free account can build an entire product out of objects other people published and list one of its own. The wall sits one step earlier, at making the object there is to publish.

Categories file objects, they do not check them

Objects are filed under twenty-four categories, and the picker shows a strip of them down the left. The strip lists every category that has something in it, whatever you have selected in the viewport. A category being present does not mean the objects inside it will attach to the face you are pointing at. Read the kind, not the category.

When it fails

The window opens with nothing in it. The picker draws three sections, Your smart objects, Saved from store and From the store, and hides any of them that has no rows in it. On a new account the first two are empty by definition, and the third is empty until its listings have come back, so the whole window collapses to a search field over blank space with no headings to explain the gap. That is a new account, not a broken window. Press the refresh button in the header to re-ask all three feeds, and browse the store on the site to put something in your library before you start.