Text to CAD that lands in your feature tree.
Describe the part or the change in plain English. CADABRA resolves it into native SOLIDWORKS features you can still edit, roll back, and dimension.
What text to CAD means, and where most tools stop.
Text to CAD is turning a written description into real geometry. Most tools that claim it return a mesh or a one-off solid: something you can look at and print, but not something you can dimension, revise, or release.
CADABRA runs text to CAD inside SOLIDWORKS. A prompt resolves into native feature operations, extrudes, cuts, fillets, patterns, Hole Wizard, so the result arrives in your feature tree with its sketches and dimensions intact.
What a working prompt looks like.
Prompts carry engineering intent and numbers.
- Make the wall 3 mm thicker
- Finds the driving sketch or the shell feature, changes the dimension, and rebuilds the part along with anything downstream that depends on it.
- Fillet all sharp edges on this face at 2 mm
- Selects the qualifying edges on the referenced face and adds a single fillet feature, rather than one feature per edge.
- Add a 6 mm counterbored hole pattern on a 40 mm bolt circle
- Creates the Hole Wizard feature with the counterbore standard you configured, then the circular pattern that places it.
- Pattern this rib eight times around the axis
- Reads the selected feature and the axis, adds the circular pattern, and rebuilds.
- Change the material to 6061-T6 and report the new mass
- Applies the material from your library and returns the updated mass properties.
- Apply this same edit to every part in the family
- Repeats the resolved operation across the configurations or the parts you pointed at.
Why the output stays editable.
Native features, not imported bodies.
Every operation CADABRA performs is one SOLIDWORKS would perform. There is no translation step and no foreign body, so the feature tree stays yours and the file stays a normal SLDPRT.
- Sketches, dimensions, and relations are all present and editable.
- Roll back, suppress, and reorder work exactly as they always did.
- Nothing to re-import when the design changes.
It reads the model before it acts.
A prompt like "thicken the wall" only means something against a specific part. CADABRA resolves the reference against the open document, its geometry, and its history, then performs the operation that matches.
- Reads the active document, its feature tree, and the current selection.
- Shows what it changed so you can verify or revert it.
On your standards, not generic defaults.
Hole standards, material libraries and naming conventions come from your own configuration and from the SOLIDWORKS seat you already run, so generated geometry matches what your team ships.
- Company hole and fastener standards applied automatically.
- Fasteners inserted from your SOLIDWORKS Toolbox rather than modelled.
- Materials assigned from your own material library.
Generic text-to-CAD versus text to CAD in SOLIDWORKS.
| Generic text-to-3D tools | CADABRA | |
|---|---|---|
| Output | Mesh or a single frozen solid | Native SOLIDWORKS features in your tree |
| Editable afterwards | Re-prompt and regenerate from scratch | Edit a dimension, roll back, reorder |
| Works on your existing parts | No, it generates new objects | Yes, it edits the open document |
| Company standards | Not applied | Hole, material, and naming standards applied |
| Drawings and BOMs | Not produced | Produced from the same model |
| Where it runs | A separate web app | Inside SOLIDWORKS, on your license |
How to run text to CAD in SOLIDWORKS.
-
01
Install the add-in
Close SOLIDWORKS, run the installer, and enable CADABRA. No migration, no file conversion, and your existing license is the only one you need.
-
02
Point it at a document
Open the part or assembly. CADABRA reads the feature tree and your configured standards before it does anything.
-
03
Write the instruction
Say what you want in engineering language, with the numbers that matter. An instruction that names an operation, a reference and a number resolves; one missing any of the three comes back as a question.
-
04
Check the tree
The new features are in the tree. Check them, then keep modelling.
Text to CAD, answered.
What is text to CAD?
Is text-to-CAD output editable, or is it a dumb mesh?
What kind of prompts actually work?
Why not just write a macro or an API script?
Do I need my own SOLIDWORKS license?
How accurate is it, and who checks the work?
Try it on your own part.
Start free, or bring a SOLIDWORKS file to a 20-minute call and watch it edited by prompt.