Roadmap
Where HelioCad is headed — and what already shipped. We move quickly, but we're honest about what's done and what's still on the way.
Recently shipped
Sep 2026
- HelioAI drives the app — exports, drawings, save & label — with a Design Brief, review-before-apply, and an agent trace card
- Feature timeline with edit-in-place: hover highlights, a rollback bar, and rebuild preview
- Direct editing gains real Draft, variable fillets, Full Round, multi-face Shell, Align Face, and sweep rails
- Studio lighting rig and 15 physically based material packs with seamless triplanar textures
- Live Realism path-traced preview in the viewport, composition guides, saved camera shots, and output limits
- Presentation mode (P) with an idle turntable, plus Illustration and Clay display styles
- Exploded view slider for multi-body models — radial, X, Y, or Z, animated in the browser
- Smart Measure — hover readouts, pinned pairs, and exact B-Rep distances
- Adjust Model panel with sliders and exact values, typed Move and Scale, and editable patterns
- Unified drag engine with Shift/Ctrl modifiers, 3D snapping, and a model HUD
- 3D Peek, precision dimension input, and auto sketch dimensions
- The interface, HelioAI, and account emails in 13 languages
- Glide, Pivot, and Flow navigation presets, floating panels, and a rebuilt Section view
Shipped Aug 2026
Live in every account
- Head-table 5-axis kinematics, a machine editor for your own machine, and grblHAL support
- iPad landscape layout with touch and long-press, plus touch-sized floating panels
- Command palette ⌘K everywhere, rebuilt view cube, compact command header
- Auto Measure engineering dimensions with a cinematic tour
- Content-aware view placement keeps annotations on the sheet
- Ask HelioAI for a technical drawing straight from chat
- Projects manager rebuilt: rename, duplicate, folders, version restore
Shipped Jul 2026
Live in every account
- Direct laser machine control over USB — GRBL and Ruida DSP, with .rd export including raster layers
- Live laser job playback on the bed: head tracking, cut trail, framing overlay, and countdown
- Per-layer kerf compensation, movable layers on the bed, and origin-corner setup
- AI laser assistance — web-grounded settings advisor, preflight DFM checks, and test-matrix scoring
- Camera-less laser placement: drop-in jigs and 1:1 printable templates
- EzCad galvo board detection and the free HelioCad Bridge for Ethernet/USB Ruida controllers
- Photo Draft — photos plus one known length become a calibrated drawing and solid
- 4th- and 5th-axis CAM, indexed and simultaneous, with controller post-processors and a post editor
- Mold Making workspace — solid to multi-part casting mold with an AI gating plan
- Generative Fixtures — soft jaws, trays, and jigs planned by AI from the part
- Feeds & Speeds Machinist's Bench with tool-geometry visualizers
- Photoreal Render workspace with GPU path tracing
- Sketch fluidity — type-to-dimension with calculator, auto-constraint inference, drag-to-size
- Assembly joints with kinematic animation and GIF export
Shipped
Earlier releases — available in every account
- AI chat with voice input and natural-language modeling
- Phone scan to parametric CAD, mobile AR viewing, and the installable mobile app
- Sketch solver with full geometric and dimensional constraints
- 3D modeling — extrude, revolve, sweep, loft, fillet, chamfer, shell, draft, booleans, patterns
- Static, thermal, and modal FEA simulation
- CAM with optimized toolpaths, machine simulation, and G-code export
- Multi-body assemblies with mate constraints and interference detection
- Auto-generated technical drawings with dimensioning and GD&T
- Broad import / export — STEP, IGES, STL, OBJ, GLTF, 3MF, DXF
- Measurement and mass properties (volume, COG, moments of inertia)
- Named selections and interactive section views
In progress
Q4 2026
- Sheet metal workspace — flange, bend, and unfold (in private testing)
- Design Playbook — shared techniques and reference patterns
Next
Q4 2026 – Q1 2027
- Real-time collaboration with live cursors and shared sessions
- Batch G-code generation across multiple parts
Later
2027 and beyond
- Public plug-in API for community-built extensions
- Community parts library
Have a feature request?
We read every message. If something on this roadmap matters to you — or something we haven't thought of — tell us.
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