Release notes
What changed in each release, newest first. Cahaba Studio checks for updates on its own; you can also use Help > Check for Updates, or download the latest.
Released 2026-10-10 · Windows installer
- InvictusCAD is now Cahaba Studio: the same software, with a new name and look. Updating from InvictusCAD replaces it, and your license, settings, tool libraries, footprints and save backups come across; nothing needs setting up again.
- Projects now save as .cb3 files. Your .ivc files open as before, and Save As offers the new extension.
- A new look: warm charcoal panels, paper-white text and an ember accent, taken from the new logo; a new icon.
- Colors in the 3D view are easier on the eye and keep their meaning: green adds material, red removes it, blue is what's selected, and construction lines are a muted amber. Inactive controls and selected rows are easier to read.
- CAM: each kind of operation has its own toolpath color, and the stock is drawn as bronze.
- Fix (CAM): the stock that's left now shows as soon as a setup or operation is added, not only after one is selected.
Released 2026-10-09 · Windows installer
- Scan to CAD, a new workspace (Ctrl+3): bring in 3D scans (STL, OBJ, PLY, or XYZ point clouds) and model from them. Clean up the mesh (loose bits, defects, smoothing that keeps sharp edges, reducing), turn point clouds into meshes, and fill holes: they're outlined in green, and you click a dot to leave one out. Flat caps an open bottom with one flat face, keeping the part's through-holes open.
- Scan to CAD: Auto Regions splits a scan into its planes, cylinders, cones and spheres. Extract Plane, Cylinder, Cone and Sphere fit exact shapes to the scan, picked from one spot or several. Align squares the scan to the origin from the shapes you extract, and Rest on Plane sets a scan whose bottom wasn't scanned on the floor.
- Scan to CAD: Section Sketch traces the scan cut by a plane into a sketch; Outline Sketch traces a flat part's outline and holes as lines and arcs. Deviation colors the scan by its distance from your model, with a legend. Convert to Body makes the scan a body, and scans export to STL, OBJ or PLY.
- Patterns: the card chooses Features, Bodies or Components. Patterning bodies makes a separate body for each copy, and components an instance for each copy (before, copies of a body were merged into one). Each copy follows its original. The pattern is one step in the History panel: double-click it to change the count or spacing, and copies are added, removed or moved to match. Deleting it deletes its copies.
- The History panel is where features live, and the browser's Features folder is gone. Rename a step in place (F2, or right-click › Rename); click a step to pick it into a card waiting for features. A body's features are listed in the order the body builds them.
- STEP import brings in colors: each part's color becomes its body's appearance, and faces colored on their own keep their color.
- File dialogs remember the folder you last used, separately for 3D models, drawings, pictures, tool libraries and exports.
- Fix: scrolling the browser or a card with the mouse wheel no longer zooms the view once the list reaches its end.
- Fix: menus no longer show stray colored pixels at their rounded corners.
Released 2026-10-09 · Windows installer
- History panel down the right of the view: every sketch, plane and feature in the order it was made. Drag the marker up to roll the design back (later steps drop out, and new work goes in there); drag steps to reorder them; right-click to suppress, build up to a step, or delete. Click a face, edge or vertex in the view and the steps that made it light up green, the ones that changed it blue.
- Section Analysis (INSPECT): see the part cut open along a plane or flat face, with the cut faces hatched. Move, tilt, turn or flip the cut; sections are kept in the browser's Analysis folder to show, hide and edit.
- Measure: measure whole bodies (volume, area, mass from the material, center of mass), choose how many decimal places to show, see a face's perimeter, and read the distance beside its line in the view.
- Combine: join, cut or intersect bodies. A cut can leave a radial and an axial clearance around the tools, and tools not kept are used up (their steps stay in the history).
- Split Body: cut a body by a plane or any face, extended through or not; every piece becomes a body.
- Mirror: features, whole bodies, or components (an opposite-hand copy as a component of its own). Mirrored copies follow their originals.
- Delete features, and anything other objects use: InvictusCAD names what uses it and offers to delete those too. Delete is in the browser's right-click menu, and deleting several things is one undo step.
- Holes snap to corners, the centers of round edges and sketch circles, edge midpoints, anywhere along an edge, and sketch points. Switch the card to Move to drag a hole; it follows as you drag.
- Modeled tapped holes have the standard thread profile (flat crests and roots), are drilled to the thread's minor diameter, and spiral all the way through. They now come out right wherever the hole is placed, and draw smoothly.
- Insert from McMaster-Carr (File or Create): their site opens in your browser, and STEP files you download come into the design.
- Click a body, plane or sketch in the browser to pick it into the card that's waiting for one.
- SpaceMouse: smooth, steady motion; turns go around the model's middle; push forward or back to pan up and down, press or lift to zoom, tip to tumble, twist to turn. Options in Preferences, and 3Dconnexion's own settings now recognize InvictusCAD.
- Bodies draw more smoothly; small round features no longer look faceted. Sketch lines are a brighter blue.
- The version shows at the foot of the sidebar; click it to check for updates. The logo always shows in the header, and the file name is left to the window's title bar.
- Fix: a face clicked while a tool was open (the Hole tool, for one) stayed lit up.
Released 2026-10-07 · Windows installer
- Physical materials: give bodies or whole components a material (aluminum, steels, plastics, woods and more) for their mass, center of mass and look. Right-click a body for Properties.
- Appearances: pick one appearance (or a custom color and finish), then click as many faces, bodies or components as you like. Painted faces keep their look through later edits.
- Sheet metal: a Sheet Metal tab in Design with Flange (a plate, or a bent part from an open profile), Edge Flange (drag its length; pull it in from either end, with square or round reliefs sized for the material) and Convert to Sheet Metal for plates made by extruding and imported parts. Flat Pattern unfolds any part of flat walls and cylindrical or conical bends, imported STEP parts too, to DXF or SVG with bend lines. The K-factor comes from the part's material unless you set one. Export Flat and Nest Parts unfold sheet metal parts.
- Sheet metal: Hem folds an edge right back over the sheet, open (with a gap) or closed. Bend tables: give the shop's bend deductions or allowances by angle and radius, and flat patterns use them (interpolating between angles), falling back to the K-factor for bends they don't cover.
- Sheet metal flat patterns you can work on: double-click Flat Pattern under a sheet metal body (or SHEET METAL › Edit Flat Pattern) and the part lies flat; holes, cuts, chamfers and pockets made on it carry onto the bent part when you click Finish Flat Pattern (cuts across a bend wrap round it). They stay in the history: change a flange and the part unfolds and folds again with them.
- Preferences (Edit > Preferences, Ctrl+,): the units and physical material new documents start with, the hole sizes to start on (metric, inch or the document's units), and the sheet thickness and bend radius a new flange starts at.
- View cube: a home button, arrows that turn to the face beside or above, and roll arrows. Right-click it for Home, Orthographic or Perspective, Set Current View as Home, and Set Current View as Front (the cube and the standard views follow).
- SpaceMouse support: the cap pans, zooms and turns the view; its buttons fit the view and go home. Speed and directions are in Preferences.
- Picking a body (or sketch, plane or instance) in the browser highlights it in the view.
- Design's tool sets (Solid, Sheet Metal) are tabs in a row above the tools.
- View > Origin shows the X, Y and Z axes and the origin point, the same as when you choose a sketch plane. Those planes are dimmer, and run the positive ways from just off the axes instead of crossing.
- The hole and thread card has a Metric / Inch switch: either set of sizes in any document (it starts on the document's units).
- Rectangle and Center Rectangle share one toolbar button: it shows the one you used last, and its arrow offers both.
- Canvases: put a photo or scanned drawing on a plane or face to trace over, and calibrate its size with two clicks a known distance apart.
- CAM: new Chamfer, Trace, V-Carve, Bore (helical) and Thread Mill operations, and Program Stop with a message.
- CAM: contours can ramp into each depth instead of plunging, with straight leads, several finishing passes, a spring pass, tabs by spacing or triangular tabs, and cutter compensation in the control (G41/G42).
- CAM: rest machining for pockets after a bigger tool, chip-thinning feeds for adaptive clearing, and drilling by spot diameter, with shorter and shorter pecks and a gentler break-through feed.
- CAM fix: the arcs fitted to toolpaths could bulge off a long straight run that followed a small rounded corner (on an inside contour, into the wall). They now stay on the path.
- Updating InvictusCAD no longer disconnects Claude or other AI clients that are connected to it (after this update; the update to it still does, once).
Released 2026-10-07 · Windows installer
- Revolve no longer builds a body twice when a sketch and one of its regions are both picked. Fillets and chamfers on such bodies seemed to do nothing, because the untouched copy still showed the sharp edges. Files with a body like this are repaired when opened.
- A curve projected edge-on (a circle seen side-on, say) now makes flat faces. Before, it made pinched spline surfaces that other CAD programs opened from STEP files as hollow shells.
Released 2026-10-07 · Windows installer
The first public beta.
- Parametric part design: sketches with constraints and dimensions, extrude (thin walls, one side, two sides or symmetric), revolve, sweep, loft, holes, threads, fillets and chamfers (tangent chain or picked edges only), shell, patterns and mirrors.
- Parameters and expressions in any dimension, with units.
- Components, instances and linked files for assemblies.
- STEP and STL import and export; drawings in from DXF, SVG, PDF and Illustrator files, sketches out as DXF and SVG.
- CAM workspace (experimental): setups, operations and G-code posting. Check every program before running it on a machine.
- Claude can drive InvictusCAD through its MCP connection: choose the Claude option in the installer.
- Report an Issue in the sidebar sends a report straight to us.
- Updates are checked automatically and installed from Help > Check for Updates.
