Chisel

Chisel turns Blender into a real-time SDF modeling studio. Carve with math, not meshes — every surface is mathematically smooth, every boolean blends like molten metal, and the ray-marched viewport shows the final result as you sculpt.

First-run shader compilation

The first time you enable the Chisel render engine in a session, the GPU compiles the ray-marching pipelines on the fly. Expect a noticeable pause on the first viewport frame — typically a couple of seconds on Vulkan, longer on OpenGL. Compilation runs in parallel and is non-blocking, but the viewport will look empty until the first variant is ready.

A few things to know:

• It’s a one-time cost per session. Subsequent renders use the cached pipeline. The compiled binaries are also persisted to disk, so warm starts after the first run are much faster.
• Vulkan is dramatically faster than OpenGL. If your status bar shows the OpenGL backend, switch to Vulkan in Blender’s preferences (Edit → Preferences → System → Backend) for a 5–10× compile and runtime speedup.
• The pie menu warns you. When you press Q before shaders are ready, the menu shows “Shaders not compiled, first run may take longer” — and if you are on the OpenGL backend, “OpenGL backend, Vulkan is much faster”.

If you ever see flat shading, blank silhouettes, or stalls on the first interaction with a new feature (booleans, mirrors, curve primitives), it’s almost always shader compilation finishing in the background. Wait a few seconds and the viewport will catch up.

Why SDFs?

Traditional mesh modeling trades resolution for smoothness. SDFs don’t trade — they compute. A sphere stays spherical at any scale, a blend stays blended through every boolean in the stack, and a rounded corner is a math constant, not a subdivision setting. Production-ready surfaces, no topology headaches.

What’s new in v3 (3.0.0)

• GPU compute renderer — tile binning, primitive culling and tape pruning all run as GPU compute passes; the CPU no longer touches per-tile work
• Two-state render loop — navigation draws synchronously at adaptive resolution while the full-quality frame settles on a background worker and lands when ready
• Dynamic Resolution — automatically scales navigation resolution to hold a target FPS (Performance panel)
• F12 rendering — render the SDF scene through the active camera straight to the Render Result
• Mirror Object — mirror a shape across any other object, not just its own origin; moving the mirror object updates the result live
• Exact depth curves — the Curve primitive now hugs the drawn Bezier exactly: circles stay circular, sharp corners stay sharp, concave spans stay smooth
• Pinned modifiers — pin a modifier to keep it at the bottom of the stack; new modifiers insert above the pins
• RMB menu overhaul — Type picker, Swap Modifier, modal-adjust shortcuts, plus copy / duplicate / snap / parent / collection entries
• Ctrl + D Chisel duplicate — clone a shape together with its modifier graph (group cuts stay group cuts)
• Apply Modifiers — convert to mesh and clean up the source shapes in one click
• Cycle hotkeys — [ / ] cycle the primitive type, ; / ' cycle the modifier operation
• Per-chain limits doubled — 256 primitives and 512 instructions per chain
• Apple Silicon native — the new renderer runs on Metal via the arm64 build

For a complete list, see the changelog.

Where to start

• Getting Started — install Chisel, system requirements, first launch
• Primitives — every SDF shape and its parameters
• Modifiers — booleans, mirror, array, emboss, twist, bend, solidify
• Rounding & Blending — the five profiles and when to use each
• Materials — per-object color and the Chisel node editor
• Render Engine — viewport quality, matcap, proxy mesh, baking
• Interface — panels, pie menu, draw tool, gizmos
• Operations — convert to mesh, rebuild, clean, veil