Driving the editor: 39 articles with video, and a guided first design inside the app

Almost everyone who opens a CAD package for the first time knows exactly what they want to make: a bracket for the router, a lid for that box, an adapter between two things that do not fit. What they do not know is where to start.

Today we are closing that gap from both ends: a complete guide to the editor in Learn, and a guided run inside the app that builds a real first part with you.

Driving the editor

Of Learn's six paths, the editor's was the only one still empty. We had written how to design a part that survives being printed, how to join two parts and how to make a third one move — and not a line about the tools you draw all of that with. Here are seven sections and 39 articles:

• Getting around the editor (4) — the layout, selection, the shortcuts and what a save really does.
• Sketching (6) — every drawing tool, and the snapping that quietly constrains as you draw.
• Constraints and dimensions (4) — the solver, the constraints, the dimensions and regions.
• Extrude and cut (5) — extruding, cutting, where an extrude stops, twist and steps.
• Revolve, sweep and loft (5) — revolve, sweep, helix, loft and threads.
• Working with solid bodies (8) — fillet, chamfer, shell, offsets and the booleans.
• References and positioning (7) — planes, axes and points, and how to put a body exactly where it belongs.

It is not a course: it is a reference guide. One article per tool family, written for the moment you already have the tool open on screen and one specific question about it. And it is illustrated with more than fifty clips and stills of the real editor, because writing out a drag you could watch in five seconds wastes everybody's time.

If you take one thing from the whole path, take this: the toolbar shows you what your selection makes possible. There are no menus to hunt through. That is why the toolbar seems to change on its own, and why the same key does different things depending on what you have selected.

Your first design, inside the editor

The guide answers the questions of someone already inside. For day one we did something else: a guided run that opens by itself the first time you enter the editor, and does not let go until you have an STL downloaded. Nine steps in a column beside the viewport, going from a sketch to a plate, from a fillet to a hole, and from there to the file you hand the slicer.

Every step brings the written instruction, a looping clip of the same gesture you are about to make, and a ring around the button you need to press. And it is not ticked because you press "next": it is ticked when the fillet, or the cut, actually turns up in your part. There is no reaching the end without having designed anything.

The step we care about most is the eighth. You change the thickness of the plate — an extrude you made five steps earlier — and the fillet, the sketch on the top face and the hole rebuild themselves on top of it. That is what "parametric" means, and showing it costs a good deal less than explaining it:

It is free, it does not count against your plan's limit, and you can walk away halfway through and come back where you left off. New accounts are dropped straight into it; if you have spent these weeks modelling and already have things of your own on the drive, you will see it as an offer in the file manager rather than a hijack.

What is coming: the "How to" walkthroughs, inside the editor

That way of learning — the written step, the clip beside it, the ring on the button, the part growing in front of you — does not have to be spent on day one.

Next comes a series of "How to" walkthroughs launched from Learn articles: you read how a heat-set insert pocket is made, or a living hinge, and at the end of the article there is a button that opens that same exercise in the editor, with the starting file already set up and the steps alongside. Learning by modelling. We are on it, and the first ones will land soon.

And we keep writing

These seven sections ship today because they are finished, not because the path is. We will be adding more over the coming days: patterns, the parametric model and the timeline, Smart Objects — placing them and creating them — printer calibration, and getting the part out to print.

And if you open an article and the one answer you came looking for is not there, tell us. That is exactly the gap we want to keep closing.