Forge View

A cross-platform 3D CAD file previewer built with Tauri 2, React 19, TypeScript, and Three.js.

Supported formats

STL (ASCII and binary), 3MF, OBJ, GLTF, GLB, PLY, DAE.

Features

• Native file open dialog and drag-and-drop loading (drops work any time, including over an open model)
• Paged directory explorer and preview grid with multi-model "add to scene" assembly view
• Grid breadcrumbs, name/size/modified sorting, and persistent thumbnail cache (IndexedDB)
• Export the scene as STL, 3MF, OBJ, PLY, or GLB (File > Export model as)
• Edit models in place with worker-backed Make solid processing, live progress, and one-level undo
• Stage-by-stage progress feedback while reading and parsing large files and while serializing and saving exports
• Details include vertices, mesh count, boundary edges, and non-manifold edges
• Compact app menu, left Explorer, right Details panel, and bottom camera navigation
• In-app format help, About information, and repository/version status footer
• Orbit, pan, zoom controls plus a view cube and keyboard-accessible standard view snaps
• Solid, wireframe, and points view modes
• Perspective and orthographic projection
• Dark and light themes
• Quality presets (low, medium, high) with advanced overrides, persisted to disk

Editing and export

Export preserves static mesh transforms, instances, material groups, vertex colors, and other geometry attributes supported by the target format. Bake skinned poses and active morph deformation into static geometry before export.

Edit > Make solid fills the scene into one STL-style solid. Internal geometry that is not part of the outside surface, enclosed cavities and parts hidden inside other parts, is deleted, touching parts join under one skin, and triangle and vertex counts drop while the outer appearance stays exactly as loaded. Materials collapse to a single solid material. Draft, Standard, and Fine detection detail trade processing cost against how small an opening still counts as sealed. Undo restores the original geometry and materials.

Details reports boundary and non-manifold edge counts without interpreting them as model damage. Non-manifold edges inherited from the original skin are kept deliberately, because rewriting them would change the visible surface.

3MF export includes an explicit physical-unit selector and defaults to millimetres. STL, OBJ, and PLY do not encode physical units.

Prerequisites

• Node.js and pnpm
• Rust toolchain (stable) and the Tauri 2 system dependencies for your platform

Development

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev

Build

pnpm tauri build

Bundle targets are configured in src-tauri/tauri.conf.json ("all": every installer format valid for the host platform, e.g. deb/AppImage/rpm on Linux, msi/nsis on Windows, dmg/app on macOS). CI (.github/workflows/publish.yml) builds installers for all three platforms on push to main.

Brand icons

public/icon.svg is the source for the in-app mark, browser icons, and desktop bundle icons. After changing it, regenerate the Tauri assets with:

pnpm tauri icon public/icon.svg

The browser PNGs can be regenerated with ImageMagick:

magick -background none public/icon.svg -resize 16x16 public/favicon-16x16.png
magick -background none public/icon.svg -resize 32x32 public/favicon-32x32.png
magick -background none public/icon.svg -resize 180x180 public/apple-touch-icon.png
magick -background none public/icon.svg -resize 192x192 public/icon-192.png
magick -background none public/icon.svg -resize 512x512 public/icon-512.png
magick -background none public/icon.svg -define icon:auto-resize=64,48,32,16 public/favicon.ico

Web demo (GitHub Pages)

The frontend also runs as a static site without the Tauri backend. In browser mode you can drag and drop a model file (or use Open / Open Folder, which fall back to browser pickers) and view it with all camera, view mode, and theme controls.

Open Folder loads a local, read-only snapshot of the selected folder into the explorer and preview grid; Forge View does not upload those files. Re-pick the folder to refresh it. Chromium browsers refuse to grant sites access to top-level system folders (Documents, Downloads, Desktop, the home folder) and show a "contains system files" message; pick a subfolder inside them instead. In browsers without the native directory picker (Firefox, Safari) an in-app dialog explains this before the browser shows its upload-style confirmation.

Supported browsers show a Save As picker for exports, allowing the filename and location to be selected; other browsers use their configured download behavior. On iOS the file picker lists all files, because iOS greys out extensions it cannot map to system types (such as .stl); unsupported picks are rejected after selection instead. Settings persistence needs native file system access and is disabled in the browser. The explorer initially shows 100 entries per directory and the preview grid shows 60 files, with Load more controls for larger folders.

Note: WebGL2 is required. Chrome and Edge disable WebGL entirely when hardware acceleration is off (chrome://settings/system) and no longer fall back to software rendering; Firefox falls back automatically.

.github/workflows/pages.yml builds and deploys the web bundle to GitHub Pages on push to main. One-time setup: repository Settings > Pages > Build and deployment > Source: "GitHub Actions".

Test

pnpm test                      # frontend unit tests (vitest)
pnpm test:e2e                  # desktop and mobile app-shell tests (Playwright)
cd src-tauri && cargo test     # backend unit tests

Project layout

• src/ React + Three.js frontend (components, loaders, hooks, store, themes)
• src-tauri/ Rust backend (file IO commands, app setup)
• CLAUDE.md architecture and conventions reference

Acknowledgements

Forge View is built on these open-source projects:

• Three.js (MIT) — 3D rendering, model loaders (STL, 3MF, OBJ, GLTF, PLY, DAE), exporters, and the bundled fflate zip library used for 3MF
• Tauri 2 (MIT/Apache-2.0) — desktop shell, dialog and filesystem plugins, and the Rust backend framework
• React (MIT) — user interface
• Zustand (MIT) — application state
• Tailwind CSS (MIT) — styling
• Serde (MIT/Apache-2.0) — Rust serialization
• Vite, Vitest, Playwright, and TypeScript (MIT/Apache-2.0) — build and test tooling

Thanks to the maintainers and contributors of these projects.