Made with CubbyCAD
The ships and parts for Cannons & Coastlines are modeled in CubbyCAD and sliced in CubbySlicer. I made CubbyCAD for this game, and CubbySlicer is my web port of OrcaSlicer to go with it.
Why I made them
I made the proof-of-concept models in Tinkercad, then moved to Blender. Blender was great for shaping the hulls, but for exact, CAD-like edits I kept running into crashes and slowdowns that broke up my workflow.
The hulls are organic, hand-shaped models, but they also need exact slots for the cannons, masts, cargo and coins, or nothing fits. I wanted sculpting and precise hard-surface modeling in the same model, without exporting back and forth between two programs.
I also work on this from a few different computers, usually in between other things. Both apps run in the browser with nothing to install, and cloud workspaces keep the files in sync, so a hull picks up wherever I left it. And it had to stay easy to use, so the basics still work like Tinkercad (drop in shapes, mark some as holes, group them).
CubbyCAD
A 3D modeler in the browser, for parts you're going to print.
- Sculpting and CAD in one part
- Each hull is a sculpt. Sculpting turns a shape into a signed distance field (SDF) that you push and pull with brushes like clay, and the sculpt sits in the same group as ordinary shapes. The hulls also have a mirror modifier on them, so both sides always match.
- Holes cut with CSG
- Every slot in a hull is a shape marked as a hole in the hull's group. Manifold does the booleans, so the result is one watertight solid, and the STL prints the way it looks on screen.
- Shared parts
- The cannon deck, mast, cargo, coin, movement wheel and bottom text cutouts are each their own part, and the hulls embed them by reference. Both base-set hulls use the same six, so a fit fix goes into one file and every hull that uses it gets it.
- Sketches for the hard edges
- Draw on a face or the ground, then extrude or revolve it. The cannon is built from revolved and extruded sketches plus a few boxes, and the Jolly Roger on the Corsair's sides is an extruded sketch cut into the hull.
- Save anywhere, then slice
- Save to the browser with no account, to a folder on disk, or to a cloud workspace that syncs between devices once you sign in. Export an STL, or send the model straight to CubbySlicer with File ▸ Export ▸ Open Slicer.
CubbyCAD is free to use. The paid Enhanced plan unlocks the rest of the sculpt brushes, more modifiers (arrays and decimate among them), more export formats and more cloud storage.
CubbySlicer
A web port of OrcaSlicer. It's the real Orca slicing engine compiled to WebAssembly, with Orca's menus, tools and profiles in a browser tab. (It's still marked experimental.)
- Three engines
- OrcaSlicer, preFlight and Full Spectrum, picked at the top of the Printer section. Each keeps its own presets, and all of them use Orca's printer profiles.
- The usual Orca tools
- Plates, support, seam and color painting, cut with connectors, variable layer height, calibration prints and print host upload (OctoPrint, Moonraker, PrusaLink and others).
- Opens CubbyCAD files
- It opens and saves files in CubbyCAD workspaces, and can edit CubbyCAD's basic shapes, holes and groups right on the plate.
- Orca-compatible projects
- Projects save as OrcaSlicer 3MF files, so desktop OrcaSlicer and Bambu Studio open them with their plates and settings, and their project files open here too.
The layer heights, colors and assembly for each fleet are in the print guide.