Say what you want. Get a printable thing.

When you start a new design, the Studio asks for a few things. Only the first (or the second) is required — everything else sharpens the result:

The first build takes about 30–60 seconds. It lands in your workspace — a 3D preview you can spin, downloadable files (STEP, STL, 3MF), a chat box to refine it, and full version history. Your description becomes the project's prompt: you can edit it and recompile any time.

Two ways to start a design

The Studio home offers two front doors. Pick by what you have in hand:

The assistant is the electronics-first path: it opens with "What do you want to build?" and works best when your first message says what it does, how it's powered, your skill level, and a budget — for example, "a battery-powered outdoor soil-moisture sensor with WiFi, beginner, around ₦15,000." It searches the catalog, builds a bill of materials, and hands off to the Studio with Add 3D-printed enclosure. Everything else in this guide is about the design prompt itself, which both paths share.

This is the mental shift that makes everything click. Forge is not sculpting freehand from your words. It does two things, in order:

1. Picks a design type from what you name — a lamp, a clock, an RC truck, an enclosure, a gridfinity bin. There are 30-plus engineered types, each a complete product.
2. Fills in the numbers — dimensions, colours, which parts go where — from the specifics you gave, using sensible defaults for anything you left out.

So the single most important move is to name the object first, then add specifics. "A desk lamp" already gives you a weighted base, a raked arm, and a tilting shade. Now you just adjust: "a tall desk lamp, matte black, with a wide shade."

A strong prompt has up to five parts. Only the first is required; add the rest as they apply.

You don't need all five, and you don't need to be exact — "about," "roughly," "a little taller" all work. Forge fills gaps with defaults and you refine from there. The parts you do name are the parts you control.

Because Forge picks a type from your words, knowing the words that land is the whole game. Say any of these and you get the matching engineered design. (A fuller list is the cheat sheet at the end.)

If nothing matches, Forge composes a bespoke system from scratch — bays on a carrier plate, or coaxial round parts. You're never limited to the named types; they're just the fast path.

Give sizes in millimetres, in plain words. All of these read cleanly:

You can dimension by the thing rather than the box: "a case for a Raspberry Pi 4," "sized for a 2S 14500 pack," "fits a 56 mm clock movement." Forge knows common part footprints and sizes the housing around them with the right clearances.

The Material and Colour pickers set the whole-part default. Materials: PLA, PLA (Matte), PETG, ABS, TPU. Colours include Black, White, Red, Blue, Gray, Green, Yellow, and translucent options.

But you can also name colours in the prompt, per part — and that's how you get a multi-colour print. Forge reads each colour onto the piece you attached it to:

The whole-design types make one-liners powerful. Name it, add a detail or two, done.

Name the boards and modules and Forge mounts each on the right socket — real standoffs, and a cutout for the connector. You don't place anything; you list it.

Prefer the components list field for a pure parts box — one item per line. Each line becomes a mounted, cut-out bay, and every bought part lands on your BOM automatically.

When several parts share one build, describe the arrangement — a row of bays on a carrier, optionally housed under a shell. This is the "custom parts assembled into a system" case.

For a dashboard, describe the gauges and where they sit: "an instrument cluster with a clock on the left and a 0–120 speedometer on the right." Forge lays them on a fascia panel, each seated in its own bored opening.

An RC vehicle is one rich object — name the body style and the details, nothing else. The real drivetrain, steering, and wheels come with it.

Robots follow the same one-object rule: "a rover / line-follower" builds a two-wheel driving base; "a hexapod walker" builds a six-legged body; "a robot arm with a gripper" puts a 3-DOF arm on a bench beside its controller bay.

Uploads make Forge exact instead of approximate. All are optional, under "Ground it with your files."

You rarely nail everything first try — and you don't have to. Once a design lands, the workspace has a refine box: "Ask for a change — make it 5mm taller, move the USB-C to the left wall, add vents on the lid." Type a change in plain English and Forge revises only that, keeping the rest identical, then re-renders. (You refine from any finished version.)

Good refinement phrases are small and concrete:

Most first drafts are 80% right. The fastest path to 100% is a generate, a look at the preview, and two or three small refine messages — not one perfect mega-prompt.

Keep this nearby. The left words route to a ready-made design; the right words tune it.

Name the design

Tune it