Chisel
View Markdown

Apply Modifiers

Bake a whole chain (the active object plus every operand) into a single Chisel shape and clear its modifier stack. The result is not a static mesh: it is a mesh-based SDF that keeps rendering the exact shape the chain produced, takes new modifiers, blends with its neighbours, and can still be converted to a mesh later.

How to use

  1. Select the Chisel object at the top of the chain.
  2. Open the modifier list’s options menu (the three-dot button above the stack) and click Apply All.
  3. Set the resolution and margin in the dialog, then confirm.

The chain’s field is sampled into a signed-distance grid on the base object, a display mesh is contoured from it, and the modifier stack is emptied.

Options

  • Field Resolution: grid cells along the chain’s longest axis (default 128, range 8–1024). This is the shape’s detail from now on. Above roughly 256 the grid costs gigabytes of VRAM and the bake takes minutes.
  • Mesh Resolution: density of the visible display mesh, independent of the field (default 128). Values above 256 are capped.
  • Field Margin: the exact-field shell baked around the surface, in voxels (default 8, range 6–64). Blends and emboss strengths applied later have to fit inside it, so raise it if you plan to keep building on the result.
  • Delete Sources: default on. Remove the boolean and emboss operands the chain consumed. Operands that still render on their own, or that another chain also uses, are kept regardless, and the report tells you how many. Carve targets are live shapes and are never deleted.

Memory check

Before baking, Chisel prices the grid against your GPU’s memory and the SDF Store Budget. A resolution that would not fit is refused up front, with a message naming the largest resolution that does.

Quality

The bake follows the surface, so the voxels land where the shape is rather than on an inflated box. The applied shape matches what the chain rendered at the same slider value. The display mesh is shaded from the field, not from its own facets, so its normals track the rendered surface at any mesh resolution.

Apply, Convert, or Clean?

OperationWhat you get
Apply All (this page)One Chisel shape, operands removed: still an SDF, still editable, but the chain is flattened
Convert to MeshAn ordinary Blender mesh, with full control over algorithm and cell size; the SDF object stays around
CleanThe shapes stay separate SDF objects, just detached from their booleans

Use Apply All when a sub-assembly is done and you want to keep building on it as one shape. Use Convert when you need polygons. Use Clean when you want to keep editing the operands.

See also