Changelog

Version history for Chisel.

4.0.0

Version 4 is about two things: bringing your own meshes into Chisel, and making heavy scenes feel light. You can now turn any mesh object into a Chisel shape, draw your own polygons, cut with a line you drag across the viewport — and editing stays smooth while you do it, because Chisel only recomputes the part of a shape you actually touched.

New

• Use any mesh as a Chisel shape — point Chisel at a mesh, a scan, or a CAD import, and it becomes an SDF shape. From there it behaves like every other primitive: boolean it, blend it, mirror it, emboss it.
• Ngon — draw your own polygon — an extruded polygon you edit right in the viewport. Drag the points, click an edge to add one, press X to delete one, and round each corner on its own with any of the five profiles. Corners stay clean even where the shape folds inward.
• Oblong — the shape between box and capsule — rounded vertical corners and rounded caps, controlled separately.
• Bisect — cut with a line you draw — drag across the viewport and every selected shape is sliced by that plane. Draw a polyline instead and you get a folded cut with a roundable crease at each corner. F flips which side you keep.
• The tool now has modes — Select, Create, and Bisect. Select mode hands the mouse back to Blender’s own selection tools, so you can leave the Chisel tool active all the time instead of switching away to select something.
• Rounding, bevel, blend, smooth, and thickness are no longer capped. The sliders still stop where they always did, but you can type or drag past that when a shape needs it.

Performance

• Dragging no longer hitches. Chisel recalculates only the region of a shape you edited, and does it in the background, so the viewport keeps moving while it works.
• Big shapes stay responsive while you scale them — they simplify during the drag and sharpen the moment you let go.
• Orbiting a still scene is free. Mirrored and arrayed shapes are no longer rebuilt just because the camera moved.
• Files with mesh shapes open instantly. The baked result is saved inside your .blend, so reopening skips the wait. Anything too large to store rebuilds quietly in the background instead of freezing the viewport — see storage settings.
• Moving a whole assembly around the scene is instant — Chisel recognises that the shape hasn’t actually changed and skips the rebuild.
• Curve shapes got the same background, edit-only-what-changed treatment as everything else.
• Up to 30× faster viewport on Apple Silicon. A single line in the render code was quietly limiting Apple GPUs to a quarter of their capacity. A test sphere went from 59 ms a frame to 1.8 ms on an M4.
• macOS now gets every speed-up Windows and Linux have — the platforms are finally at parity.

Fixed

• Large smooth unions no longer split open at the seam.
• Heavy edits with lots of detail or wide blends no longer freeze or crash the graphics driver.
• Circular arrays now land in the same place in the viewport, the preview mesh, and the converted mesh — and previews refresh when you change the array.
• Fixed a crash when undoing right after deleting an object.
• Add Curve now picks up the curves you selected instead of creating duplicates.
• Blender no longer shows a “Policy violation” warning when Chisel repairs its own libraries.

Compatibility

• Blender 4.5.7+ and 5.x, on Windows, Linux, and macOS (Apple Silicon)
• Scenes from version 2 and 3 open unchanged

3.0.0

The viewport renderer is rebuilt from the ground up. Per-frame tile building, primitive culling, and tape pruning now run as GPU compute passes; navigation and refinement are decoupled; and the per-chain limits double. Also new: F12 rendering, Mirror Object, an exact depth-curve primitive, and a big round of modifier and menu UX.

New

• F12 rendering — render the SDF scene through the active camera 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
• Mirror across the active object — mirror all selected shapes across the active one in a single step
• Depth curves rebuilt — the Curve primitive hugs the drawn Bezier exactly: circles are exact, 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
• Boolean / Displace target picker — a native object search field for picking the target
• Ctrl + D Chisel duplicate — duplicates 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 (Chisel tool only)
• RMB context menu overhaul — Type picker, Swap Modifier, modal-adjust shortcuts, plus copy / duplicate / snap / parent / collection entries
• Pie menu dual buttons — click adds a primitive or modifier, Shift + click swaps it on everything selected
• Show Bounds for non-rendered SDF helpers, plus a Bounds outline mode
• Render flag decoupled from viewport display — hide a shape from the render without hiding it in the viewport
• Debug preferences — diagnostics report, pipeline-cache tools, and a Verbose Logging toggle (console is quiet by default now)
• Tool tooltip shows the addon version and the full hotkey list

Performance

• GPU compute pipeline — tile binning, per-tile primitive masks, interval pruning, and tape compaction all happen on the GPU; 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 worker and lands when ready
• Dynamic Resolution — automatically scales navigation resolution to hold a target FPS (Performance panel)
• Per-chain limits doubled — 256 primitives and 512 instructions per chain
• Per-chain occupancy grids skip empty space (replaces the scene-wide grid)
• Clean-frame caching — camera-only frames reuse tiles, tapes, and materials; edits invalidate just the touched object or material instead of the whole scene
• Coalesced per-primitive GPU loads in the chain interpreter (~10% faster march)
• Front-to-back tile ordering and per-chain step budgets tiered by primitive count
• Apple Silicon — the new renderer runs natively on Metal

Fixed

• Convert cutting flat faces through chamfered booleans
• Convert clipping chamfer-smooth blends at the mesh boundary; converted normals now match the rendered surface
• Bake producing all-black maps for boolean objects; standalone bakes rendering the wrong output map
• Twist / Bend mismatch between the viewport and the converted mesh
• Boolean-seam noise and black glitches on multi-chain scenes, especially at a distance
• Curve clipping when rotated or far from the origin, blend gaps, navigation holes, and broken normals
• Crash on Ctrl + D duplicate (two separate causes, both fixed)
• Crash on undo from a stale handler reference
• Veil no longer hides the objects you currently have selected
• The Q pie menu only opens inside the Chisel tool; Alt + Q still works everywhere
• Convert to Mesh from the RMB menu now opens its options dialog
• Cone / Trapezoid proxy mesh not updating on cap changes or type switches

Compatibility

• Blender 4.5.7+ and 5.x — wheels for Python 3.11 and 3.13, on Windows, Linux, and macOS (Apple Silicon)
• Existing 2.x scenes load unchanged
• Depth curves pick up the rebuilt SDF automatically — shapes now follow the drawn curve exactly, so loosely-drawn curves may fill out slightly at the corners
• Addon / wheel mismatch is now detected by a build-hash handshake — a stale wheel shows a “rebuild wheels” notice instead of failing silently

1.2.0

New

• Array modifier — repeat shapes along an offset, with smooth blending between copies
• Circle Array modifier — repeat radially around X / Y / Z
• Curve Tube primitive — 3D Bezier sweep with per-point radius (Alt + S)
• Curve Revolve primitive — sweep a 2D profile around an axis
• N-sided prism (3, 5, 6, 8) with independent bevel and cap rounding
• Trapezoid with independent bevel and cap rounding
• Five rounding / blending profiles — Round, Sharp, Soft, Tight, Chamfer
• Mirror Smooth modal in the pie menu
• SDF custom normals option in the convert-to-mesh operator
• Auto-expand bounding box — replaces the old manual-padding setting
• Built-in matcaps with color tint
• Custom primitive icons in the pie and add menus
• Modifier panel toolbar — add, remove, and reorder modifiers without leaving the panel
• Viewport render resolution setting
• Progressive settled rendering — sharper frames once the viewport stops moving
• Blender 4.5 / EEVEE Next compatibility

Performance

• Faster camera orbit and panning
• Smoother viewport rotation across dense scenes
• Static-frame matrix caching to avoid redundant work

Fixed

• Clean operator works on any SDF object, not just parented children
• Curve boolean rendering and cache refreshes correctly
• Curve Revolve profile no longer creates negative-radius artifacts when crossing the axis
• Bake no longer produces black images on certain GPU drivers
• Pie menu modifier rows no longer overlap
• Prism bevel and cap match between viewport and mesh converter
• Prism chamfer blends and ray-march overshoot corrections
• First-frame rotation stutter and undo-related crashes
• Zero-rounding shapes render cleanly; cylinder rim normals are smooth
• Torus rebuilds correctly after editing minor radius
• Adaptive mesh refinement no longer leaves holes
• Flat shading after hide/unhide / undo is gone
• Broken chains are skipped instead of flat-shaded
• Gamma correction in the bake system is version-aware
• macOS / Metal compatibility

1.0.3

Fixed

• macOS / Metal backend compatibility

1.0.2

Fixed

• Orthographic rendering — hit condition, depth mapping, and LOD

1.0.1

New

• Progressive shader initialization with UI status warnings

Fixed

• OpenGL compatibility for boolean chain rendering

1.0.0

• Initial release
• 9 SDF primitives: Sphere, Box, Cylinder, Cone, Torus, Capsule, Prism, Trapezoid, Curve
• Boolean operations: Difference, Union, Intersect with 3 blend profiles
• Solidify and Mirror modifiers
• Edge rounding with Sphere, Smooth, and Linear profiles
• Ray-marching render engine with matcap shading
• Adaptive quality and BVH acceleration
• Mesh conversion: Dual Contouring, Marching Cubes
• Map baking: Normal, Height, Mask
• Pie menu for quick access to all operations