Dripping iced donut modeled with SubD tools inside FreeCAD

Nov 10, 2026 Last reply: 2 hours ago 4 Replies
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Organic shapes in parametric CAD usually mean a fight: hacky boolean lumps, or a round trip through a sculpting app and back, with mesh cleanup waiting at the end. This build takes a different route. The maker sculpted a donut with dripping icing entirely inside FreeCAD, using the SubD Modeler workbench on a dev build, version 27.1.0dev. In my view that is the interesting part: the whole thing stays in one environment from cage to finished solid.



The technique relies on manipulating the polygonal cage to shape organic surfaces. The tools panel carries Extrude, Bevel, Inset, Knife (loop), Bridge and Subdivide, and in Edit mode a blue control mesh sits over the icing layer while the maker works it. Flipping from Edit mode to Object mode hides that wireframe cage and shows the smooth shaded result: a yellowish-tan body under brown frosting that drips down the sides. The camera orbit and close zooms show the surfaces holding up from several angles.



Two details stand out to me. First, the maker converted the model to a solid and fused it in PartDesign, and explained that a solid face can start an organic shape which is then fused back into one body. That seems like a genuinely useful bridge between precise CAD and freeform work. Second, the maker keeps their own macros as text in the upper corner of the interface, and argues that granular undo and redo beyond the main Undo function is fundamental to trial-and-error modeling. I think that is a fair point for cage editing.



The open question is the interface itself. Some feel the workbench blends too much of Blender into FreeCAD and dislike the mismatch, while the maker counters that Blender feels overwhelming for infrequent users and that exporting geometry between the two does not work well. Whether the trade is worth it seems to depend on how often you need organic forms.


The text macros in the corner of the interface look like a smart call to me. The maker argues that text-based GUIs suit rarely used workbenches better than icon rows, and for tools that stay active together during cage editing, a visible editing mode plus labeled text beats hunting for tiny icons. It trades screen space for clarity, which seems like the right trade here.

I am curious about the fusion step. Does the organic icing actually start from a face of the solid donut body, or is it built as a separate cage and joined afterwards? And once it is converted to a solid, does the fused result behave like any other PartDesign feature?

The maker addressed that directly. The workbench lets a solid face start an organic shape that can be fused back into one body, and the donut was converted to a solid and fused in PartDesign. Beyond that, no further detail on the exact feature tree has been shared, so how the steps are ordered in the model is not something the maker has said.

A variation worth trying: start from a toroid for the body, then use the curves workbench to project the glaze outline onto it, extrude the glaze and finish with a fillet on the edge. That could give a crisper, more repeatable drip boundary than freehand cage edits, while keeping the SubD pass for the soft rounded body. Comparing both routes on the same donut would show where each method wins.

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