AtomArtist

May 27, 2026 · View on GitHub

AtomArtist

Support the Project

Buy Me A Coffee

AtomArtist is open-source and free to use, maintained in spare time as a labor of love. Friends James Smith and Dan Ruskin help out from time to time too.

If you find it useful, here are a few ways to help keep development going:

  • Donations: Buy Me a Coffee — every coffee helps.
  • Star the repo: Costs nothing and helps others find the project.
  • Report issues: Open an issue for bugs or feature ideas.
  • Contribute: PRs welcome — open an issue first to discuss larger changes.

A visual node-based 3D design tool. Wire together typed nodes — primitives, transforms, boolean operations, extrusions, imported meshes — and watch the resulting 3D geometry update live in the viewport.

Targets Windows, macOS, and the web (WASM via WebGPU / WebGL2).

Try it in your browser: larsbrubaker.github.io/atomartist  — live build of demo-wasm deployed automatically from main.

Status: Phase 0 — empty workspace skeleton. Active development.

Architecture

Pure Rust, no JavaScript or TypeScript. Built on:

  • agg-gui — immediate-mode GUI framework with wgpu rendering
  • manifold-rust — MeshGL and CrossSection types, boolean operations
  • clipper2-rust — 2D path boolean / offset
  • tess2-rust — extrude cap tessellation
  • wgpu — cross-platform GPU rendering (Vulkan / Metal / DX12 / WebGPU / WebGL2)

Workspace layout

atomartist/
├── atomartist-lib/         # Graph engine, node types, geometry, serialization
├── atomartist-renderer/    # 3D viewport (wgpu) — orbit camera, shaders, gizmos
├── atomartist-ui/          # Shared widget tree — node canvas, property panel, toolbar
├── demo-native/            # winit + wgpu native binary (Windows / macOS / Linux)
└── demo-wasm/              # wasm-bindgen entry for the browser

Build

Native

cargo run -p demo-native --release

Web (WASM)

The hosted build at https://larsbrubaker.github.io/atomartist/ is rebuilt and redeployed by .github/workflows/deploy-demo.yml on every push to main.

To run the same bundle locally:

# One-time install:
cargo install wasm-pack basic-http-server

# Build + serve:
wasm-pack build demo-wasm --target web
cd demo-wasm && basic-http-server .
# Open the URL printed (default http://127.0.0.1:4000/) and visit
# /index.html — the page mounts the AtomArtist UI on a full-window
# canvas via wgpu's WebGL2 backend.

Repository layout for sibling crates

atomartist depends on several sibling repositories via path dependencies (so a local edit in agg-gui is picked up immediately). Clone them next to this repo so the ../../agg-gui/agg-gui style paths in our Cargo.toml files resolve:

parent-dir/
├── atomartist/        (this repo)
├── agg-gui/
├── agg-rust/
├── manifold-rust/
├── clipper2-rust/
└── tess2-rust/

CI mirrors this layout on the runner — see the Checkout … steps in .github/workflows/ci.yml and deploy-demo.yml.

Tests

cargo test --workspace

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Part of the rust-apps suite — a collection of Rust graphics and geometry libraries by Lars Brubaker.