Changelog

What changed in Chisel 4.0.

4.0.0

Version 4 is about two things: bringing your own meshes into Chisel, and making heavy scenes feel light. You can now turn any mesh object into a Chisel shape, draw your own polygons, cut with a line you drag across the viewport — and editing stays smooth while you do it, because Chisel only recomputes the part of a shape you actually touched.

New

• Use any mesh as a Chisel shape — point Chisel at a mesh, a scan, or a CAD import, and it becomes an SDF shape. From there it behaves like every other primitive: boolean it, blend it, mirror it, emboss it.
• Ngon — draw your own polygon — an extruded polygon you edit right in the viewport. Drag the points, click an edge to add one, press X to delete one, and round each corner on its own with any of the five profiles. Corners stay clean even where the shape folds inward.
• Oblong — the shape between box and capsule — rounded vertical corners and rounded caps, controlled separately.
• Bisect — cut with a line you draw — drag across the viewport and every selected shape is sliced by that plane. Draw a polyline instead and you get a folded cut with a roundable crease at each corner. F flips which side you keep.
• The tool now has modes — Select, Create, and Bisect. Select mode hands the mouse back to Blender’s own selection tools, so you can leave the Chisel tool active all the time instead of switching away to select something.
• Rounding, bevel, blend, smooth, and thickness are no longer capped. The sliders still stop where they always did, but you can type or drag past that when a shape needs it.

Performance

• Dragging no longer hitches. Chisel recalculates only the region of a shape you edited, and does it in the background, so the viewport keeps moving while it works.
• Big shapes stay responsive while you scale them — they simplify during the drag and sharpen the moment you let go.
• Orbiting a still scene is free. Mirrored and arrayed shapes are no longer rebuilt just because the camera moved.
• Files with mesh shapes open instantly. The baked result is saved inside your .blend, so reopening skips the wait. Anything too large to store rebuilds quietly in the background instead of freezing the viewport — see storage settings.
• Moving a whole assembly around the scene is instant — Chisel recognises that the shape hasn’t actually changed and skips the rebuild.
• Curve shapes got the same background, edit-only-what-changed treatment as everything else.
• Up to 30× faster viewport on Apple Silicon. A single line in the render code was quietly limiting Apple GPUs to a quarter of their capacity. A test sphere went from 59 ms a frame to 1.8 ms on an M4.
• macOS now gets every speed-up Windows and Linux have — the platforms are finally at parity.

Fixed

• Large smooth unions no longer split open at the seam.
• Heavy edits with lots of detail or wide blends no longer freeze or crash the graphics driver.
• Circular arrays now land in the same place in the viewport, the preview mesh, and the converted mesh — and previews refresh when you change the array.
• Fixed a crash when undoing right after deleting an object.
• Add Curve now picks up the curves you selected instead of creating duplicates.
• Blender no longer shows a “Policy violation” warning when Chisel repairs its own libraries.

Compatibility

• Blender 4.5.7+ and 5.x, on Windows, Linux, and macOS (Apple Silicon)
• Scenes from version 2 and 3 open unchanged

4.0.1 hotfix

A follow-up for Blender 4.5–5.0 on all three platforms.

• Windows: opening the renderer could crash Blender instantly on Blender 4.3–5.0, whose bundled C++ runtime is older than the DX12 shader compiler needs. Chisel now detects the old runtime and uses Vulkan there; Blender 5.1+ keeps DX12.
• Blender 4.x viewports (4.5 LTS included) rendered far too dark, matcaps especially. Colors now match Blender 5.x.

Other versions

Each documentation version carries the changelog for its own release. Earlier and later releases: 4.1.0 · 3.0.0 · 1.2.0 · 1.0.x