woby

woby is a desktop application for viewing and analyzing 3D geometry.

Features

• Supports obj file format: Triangular meshes, polygon meshes, point clouds and OBJ freeform geometry including Bézier and B-spline/NURBS curves and surfaces, with trim boundaries and holes.
• Importers: Write your importers to support any file format.
• VTK tetrahedral meshes: Load ASCII unstructured grids with 4-node and 10-node tetrahedra. Importers can also return these cells. No VTK library is required.
• AI support: Tell your AI where to find woby executable, it will figure out the rest. CLI based http server that can do anything and everything in one or more woby instances.
• Surface comparison: Create named analyses with A/B inputs, overlays, and distance heatmaps. Set tolerances and color ranges. Results include maximum, mean, P95, and area statistics. Distances are approximate and unsigned. Measurements use the model coordinate units.
• Mesh diagnostics: Find boundary edges, winding edges, non-manifold edges and vertices, duplicates, degenerate triangles, holes, fin candidates, and self-intersections. Select findings to show them in the viewport.
• Surface mesh quality: Examine triangle size, shape quality, and local size changes. Results include histograms, percentiles, and comparisons with specified size limits.
• UV inspection: Examine an existing 2D UV layout or a 3D surface grid. Measure distortion, stretch, orientation, and overlaps. Select linked points in the source and analysis. Woby does not create UV coordinates.
• Annotations: Draw lines and rectangles on surfaces. Place text in the scene. Change text, color, and size. Keep text facing the camera or use a fixed rotation. Save annotations with the scene.
• Saved states: Save named Views and .woby scenes. Use Undo/Redo for scene changes, object additions and removals, and analysis settings.
• Model and part names: Select one model, group, or part. Press F2 or use Rename in its context menu, or edit Name in Properties. Use Restore original name to reset that item. Custom names support Undo/Redo and are saved in the .woby scene. Source files stay unchanged.
• Recent files: Use File > Recent scenes or File > Recent models to open a file again. Each list keeps up to 20 files. Right-click an entry to remove it, or use File > Clear recent history to clear both lists.
• Windows file associations: In Settings, select .woby scenes or .obj models to add this copy to Open with. Use Windows defaults to select the default app. Registration applies to the current user and does not require administrator rights. If you move the portable folder, select the file types again to register the new copy. Clear the checkboxes before deleting a registered copy.
• Export and automation: Export PNG images at a specified resolution. Include analysis legends and labels if necessary. Export diagnostic results as JSON. Use the CLI and local API to control an active viewer.

Recent file history is saved for each user. On Windows, the file is %LOCALAPPDATA%\woby\recents.json. On macOS, it is ~/Library/Application Support/woby/woby/recents.json. On Linux, it is $XDG_STATE_HOME/woby/recents.json, with ~/.local/state/woby/recents.json as the default. History is separate from saved scenes and Undo/Redo. Headless sessions do not update it.

Use Ctrl-click to select multiple rows. Use Shift-click to select a range of expanded rows. Right-click keeps the selection and adds the clicked row if necessary. The context menu shows how many items an operation affects. Use Select all in this list, or press Ctrl+A with the pointer over the list. Press Delete to apply the Delete or Remove action to the selected rows in the last clicked list. This works with one or more selected rows. Delete does not remove items while you edit text or use a dialog or context menu.

Bulk menus are available for models, analyses, annotations and cross sections, analysis inputs, detector checks, model file removal, and saved Views. Each scene edit uses one Undo step. File removal affects the scene; it does not delete files on disk. In Views, Ctrl-click and Shift-click select rows without restoring a view. A normal click restores the view.

Requirements

GPU and system	Driver version	Source information
NVIDIA on Windows	Vulkan developer beta 595.92	This release added device-address commands. Earlier releases added descriptor heaps and untyped pointers. Refer to the NVIDIA release history.
NVIDIA on Linux	Vulkan developer beta 595.44.03	This release added the same feature on Linux. Refer to the NVIDIA release history.
AMD on Windows	Adrenalin 26.6.1, with applicable RDNA 3 or later hardware	This is the first listed regular release with descriptor heaps and device-address commands. Preview 25.30.17.02 added descriptor heaps only. Refer to the AMD Vulkan release history.
AMD on Linux	Mesa RADV 26.2.0 or later	This release enables descriptor heaps by default. Refer to the Mesa 26.2 release notes.

The x64 CPU minimum is AVX2. The operating system must enable AVX register state. The Mac hardware minimum is Apple M1 or newer. Mac builds use ARM NEON.

Every x64 build includes AVX-512 coordinate rebasing. Woby selects it automatically when the CPU and operating system support the required instructions and register state. Other x64 systems use AVX2. No build option is needed.

GPU and system	Minimum feature generation	Examples
NVIDIA on Windows or Linux	Turing	GeForce GTX 1630, GTX 1650, GTX 1660, and RTX 2060. Later RTX generations also have the necessary architecture. GTX 10-series/Pascal does not have the necessary features.
AMD on Windows	RDNA 3	Radeon RX 7600. Renderer reports also include Radeon 700M integrated graphics.
AMD on Linux with RADV	RDNA 2	The AMD GPU in the Steam Deck. Radeon RX 6400 and RX 6600 are desktop candidates from this generation.

Screenshots

Large models

The Bear Trap ground model contains 75,771,986 triangles and 38,414,391 vertices in a 7.11 GB OBJ file. The lower-left status area shows the geometry counts and live FPS.

This capture shows 54.2 FPS with solid rendering at 3840 × 2071 and 4× MSAA. It uses woby 0.27.0, a Release build, on Windows with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU and an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H.

Surface comparison

Compare an original surface with a repaired surface. The distance heatmap shows the changed areas. The Properties pane shows the tolerance, color range, and distance statistics.

Mesh diagnostics

Find topology errors and select a finding to highlight the affected geometry. This sample shows a selected non-manifold edge, detector counts, and controls to move between findings.

Surface mesh quality

Compare gradual and abrupt changes in triangle size. The selected result shows local size-jump statistics and a distribution histogram. Each result uses its own color range.

Freeform geometry and UV inspection

Inspect a trimmed Bézier surface with a circular hole beside its 2D UV layout. Cyan lines show constant U values; orange lines show constant V values.

Surface annotations and saved views

Add lines, review areas, and comments to a surface. Select an annotation to edit its shape and appearance. Save a named view to return to the same scene settings and camera position.

Development tests

Build the Debug configuration, then run the CPU, slow, and graphics suites separately:

cmake --preset vs2026-vcpkg
cmake --build --preset vs2026-vcpkg
ctest --preset vs2026-vcpkg
ctest --preset vs2026-vcpkg-slow
ctest --preset vs2026-vcpkg-graphics

The presets use four CTest jobs. CPU tests run in source-file groups. Slow cases run separately and are excluded from their file groups. Graphics tests share a resource lock. Enable WOBY_TEST_HEADLESS at configuration time to include the headless rendering tests.

Use ctest --preset vs2026-vcpkg -R scene_history to run a file group. To run one case, call build/vs2026-vcpkg/bin/Debug/woby_tests.exe --test-case="case name". Individual case names and source locations remain in failure output. CI uses Ninja and the same three suite filters.