In my spare time, I’ve grown to love assembling miniature laser-cut models. The kits are detailed and intricate, and I always thought it would be fun to make my own.

Cardsharper is a web app to do just that. It takes 3D models as input and gives the user tools to break out faces and create interlocking tabs and slots based on the thickness of the material you want to cut. The meshes are converted to half edge data structures to enable selecting of connected faces, and then can be converted to a 2D space to layout laser cut patterns.

The app is currently written to run fully on the client side, however, plans are to allow registration and cloud backup of files. The 3D side is three.js, and the 2D is a modified version of paper.js with the UI all in React.