Generative art, made to plot.

The full app with no time limit. You can open and explore all 50 patterns and tools, and save documents for every pattern. Exporting is available for Trochoid-only documents in trial mode; a license unlocks export for every pattern.

50 patterns, grouped into 8 families: Curves, Shapes, Points, Multi-line, Tilings, Grids & Packing, Generative Systems, and Simulation. Many patterns also include several built-in Types — each a distinctly different design — multiplying the number of variations several times over. Each pattern ships with curated presets, and fine-grained sliders make the practical variety effectively unlimited.

Design mode gives you high-level controls; Formula mode exposes the underlying mathematical parameters for full control. Simpler patterns show a single set of controls.

Yes — every pattern includes curated presets, plus shuffle and reset controls.

Any plotter that accepts SVG. GD Studio exports one labeled group per layer (Inkscape / axicli convention), so axicli, vpype, and Inkscape's plotter extensions can route each layer to its own pen. AxiDraw-class plotters are also supported directly via Plotter Hub.

Put each pen's content on its own layer — each layer carries its own pen color, stroke width, and dash, and exports as a separate group. To split one pattern across pens, use the Split section of the Pattern tab (by path length, tile orientation, spiral arm, contour level, and more).

SVG, PDF, and direct printing, plus sending straight to a plotter over your local network with Plotter Hub.

Hidden layers are excluded, the page background isn't plotted (it's written as a CSS background that viewers show but plotters ignore — PDF export bakes it in), and the viewport is the drawable area, so anything outside the margins is clipped.

Yes. Add a Map layer and pick a scale: search for a city or area to get street-level detail, or choose a country, continent, or the whole world. Every feature is an independent toggle — motorways down to footpaths, railways, rivers, coastline, water, parks, buildings, and boundaries — so you compose exactly the map you want.

Street-level detail comes from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL); country, continent, and world scales use Natural Earth's public-domain cartography. A first fetch needs an internet connection, and because OpenStreetMap's Overpass service is a free public one, very large areas can take a while. The geometry is then stored inside your document, so a saved map reopens offline and plots identically every time — it's captured, not re-fetched.

Yes — import GPX tracks (a run, a ride, a race route) and they're drawn on top of the map. Import several at once, either merged into one layer or split into one layer per route.

Yes — Split by Map Feature puts each feature class (roads, water, parks…) or each GPX route on its own layer with its own pen, ready for a multi-pen plot. Each layer starts from a cartographic default — water, for example, in blue with a parallel-line fill — and every pen, color, and fill is yours to change from there. Closed areas are hatched rather than flooded, since a pen can't fill.

Yes — street and area names can be turned into editable Text layers, grouped by category. Each label becomes its own text item you can move, resize, or rename on the canvas.

Yes. Add a 3D Model layer and import an OBJ, STL, or PLY mesh — or start a whole document from a model. GD Studio turns the mesh into pen strokes rather than a shaded render, so the canvas shows exactly what the pen will draw. The model is embedded in the document, so a saved file reopens and plots on any machine without the original asset. If a file uses a different up-axis convention, an override stands it upright, and Replace swaps in a different mesh while keeping the layer's position, size, and all its settings. Large meshes parse in the background, so you'll see a brief loading badge before the drawing appears.

Yes — azimuth, elevation, and roll aim the camera anywhere on the sphere around the object. Four projections are available: Orthographic for a measurable technical view, Isometric at a fixed 30°, Oblique for a true front face with sheared depth (adjustable angle and depth scale, so cabinet and cavalier are both covered), and Perspective with an adjustable focal length. In Perspective, lens shift X/Y moves the camera eye sideways or vertically without rotating it — true two-point architectural perspective that keeps vertical edges vertical.

Hidden-line removal: surfaces occlude whatever sits behind them, so you get a solid object rather than a see-through wireframe. You can switch it off for an x-ray look. A mesh detail slider then sets how much of the geometry is drawn — from just the essentials (silhouette, open edges, and sharp feature edges) through progressively flatter folds, up to the full triangle wireframe.

Eight, each filling the surface with descriptive strokes instead of a flat fill. Hatch is parallel tonal hatching from a light source; Engraving cuts tonal lines along the model's own axes to wrap the form; Copperplate follows the surface's natural curvature, with a second cross-hatch family filling the shadows for a true engraved gradient; Contours are topographic slice lines, with an optional cross-axis second set; Helix winds that same slicing into one continuous spiral for a lathe-turned look; Bands draws isophotes, or lines of equal illumination; Hachures are cartographic slope hachures, denser on steep faces; and Rim echoes the visible silhouette with offset lines, dense where the surface turns away. Light-driven styles expose light direction and height, and all of them offer spacing in millimeters on paper, density, level count, and smoothing. Three overlay modifiers can be layered on top: depth cue for atmospheric fade, cast shadows for self-shadowing, and a hatched ground shadow on an imaginary floor.

Yes, and the cut applies to edges, shading, and shadows alike. Cross-Section keeps one half and hatches the exposed cut face, with axis, offset to slide the plane end to end, and flip controls. Slices cuts the whole model into equal slabs fanned out along an axis — set the slice count and the spacing, where zero reassembles it back into a solid — and each slab casts its own shadow. Section fill density and two tilt controls let you skew the cut plane off its axis for arbitrary oblique cuts across all three axes.

Yes — split the model into ordinary pen layers by shading (line work versus shading and shadows), detail (silhouette versus fine feature and mesh lines), hidden lines (their own layer, so you can dash them), depth (front-to-back bands), tone (hatching tones across pens), or slice (each slab to its own layer). After the split the model layer is replaced by regular layers, so you can recolor, restyle, or delete any of them like anything else in the document.

Yes. Add an Image layer, drop in a photo (from a file or your Photos library), and pick a conversion style. GD Studio reads the picture's light and dark and rebuilds it from continuous pen strokes and single pen-taps — never a flat ink fill — so the preview matches exactly what the pen draws. Brightness and Contrast sliders shape how the subject reads. Eight styles are available: Stipple, Halftone, Hatch, Contour, Outline, Sketch, Squiggle, and ASCII.

Yes — a color split separates the photo into one pen layer per color (faithful Natural, punchy Vivid, or Tonal light-to-dark), so you can swap pens and build up a true multi-color plot. It works with every style.

Yes — text is rendered as true plotter strokes, using single-stroke and outline fonts.

Yes — add your own custom SVG fonts in Settings and use them in any text layer.

Yes. Add an SVG layer and its lines become the layer's path; you can then restyle those lines with any pen and render style, mask them, or transform them like any other layer.

A crosshair for pen registration and plotter calibration.

Yes — choose millimeters, centimeters, or inches in Settings. Every length input across the app follows your choice. It's a display preference only; documents always store dimensions in millimeters, so switching units never changes how a saved drawing measures on paper.

Yes. In Settings you can manage the paper-size list — including adding your own custom sizes — and set the defaults a new document inherits: paper size, orientation, background color, and margins. You can do the same for stroke defaults (line width) and for fonts, including importing custom SVG fonts and choosing the default font and height.

Yes. A render-resolution setting controls how closely each curve is followed when it's flattened into plotter segments — from ultra-fine (0.025 mm) for tiny details to draft (0.5 mm) for quick proofs. Lower values give smoother strokes at the cost of larger files and slower exports.

No. It runs entirely on your Mac. The only network traffic is opt-in: sending to a Plotter Hub server you configured (usually a Raspberry Pi on your own network), fetching map data if you add a Map layer (the area you ask for goes to the public OpenStreetMap and Natural Earth services — you can point this at your own map servers instead), and, if enabled, checking for app updates. Documents, layer content, and pattern parameters never leave your machine.