Questions, answered plainly.

A web studio for making architectural and terrain models from virtual sheets on a white table. Every part is a flat outline with a real thickness, so the model you photograph is the model you cut, by laser or by hand.

Yes. During the beta everything is free, export of cutting layouts included, and there is no account to create. If export ever becomes paid, the Terms will say so first, and what you have made stays yours.

No. Greyboard runs in a current desktop browser and in Safari on iPad, drawing with WebGPU where it is available and WebGL 2 where it is not.

English, Ukrainian and Italian. The studio opens in your browser’s language and remembers your choice; numbers follow the language, so 1.5 mm in English is 1,5 mm in Ukrainian and Italian.

One action, “Export cutting layout”, gives one ZIP: a DXF (R12) and an SVG for every sheet, with CUT, ENGRAVE and LABEL layers, plus an actual-size PDF for the knife, tiled on A4 or A3 with a 50 mm check square on every page.

It is made for it: a plain R12 DXF in millimetres, with cut lines on CUT, part numbers and alignment marks engraved on ENGRAVE, and sheet captions on LABEL, so each layer gets its own laser setting. Kerf compensation is left to your laser software, which knows its machine best.

Kerf is the width of material the laser beam burns away along a cut, about 0.15–0.3 mm in card and wood. Greyboard keeps a starting kerf for each material and keeps parts at least that far apart on the sheet; measure the real value on your own machine.

Both. Greyboard, white card, basswood and corrugated board can be cut by hand in passes (1.5 mm greyboard takes 3), acrylic is scored and snapped, and kraft MDF, dark wood and terracotta are laser-only. For the knife, print the PDF at 100% and measure the 50 mm square first.

The studio estimates both laser and knife time. For example, 9 plates of 1.5 mm greyboard at 1:200 make 5.6 m of cut: about 8 minutes on a 40–60 W CO2 laser and about 28 minutes by hand. These are estimates from each material’s starting values; your machine and your hand will differ.

Not today. Greyboard reads contour lines from DXF for terrain, and you can lay pictures on the table (a file, a camera photo or a scan) as printed sheets to read and measure from. Buildings are made on the table: by hand on the mat, or quickly from boxes, walls and slabs on the base board.

A site, or terrain, model shows the ground a building stands on, usually at 1:500 or 1:200, as a stack of flat layers, one for each contour line. In Greyboard a DXF of contours becomes those layers, laid out on sheets for cutting, as stacked layers, terraces or one engraved sheet.

Contour lines as closed polylines with an elevation (Z), on one or more layers; lines, arcs and splines that meet end to end work too. Contours cut off by the edge of the survey are closed along a closed polyline on a BOUNDARY layer, or along the bounding box of all contours. If the file doesn’t state its units, the studio asks: mm, cm or m.

Contour interval = sheet thickness × scale. So 2 mm greyboard at 1:500 gives a 1 m interval, and 1.5 mm gives 0.75 m. If your contours are 2 m apart, Greyboard stacks two 2 mm plates for each level, so the height stays true.

1:500, 1:200, 1:100 and 1:50. Everything is kept in millimetres of the model, so 2 mm of greyboard at 1:100 reads as a 20 cm wall, and a 13 m house at 1:50 is 26 cm long.

Eleven: greyboard (1, 1.5 and 2 mm), white card (1–3 mm), basswood (0.8, 1.5 and 3 mm), balsa (1–3 mm), white foam board (3 and 5 mm), red card for figures, kraft MDF, corrugated board, dark wood, terracotta and acrylic (1–3 mm). Each has its own colour, grain, kerf, number of knife passes and smallest part that survives the cut.

Yes, in Safari, and it is designed for touch first. The Pencil cuts, and its pressure sets the depth of each pass; one finger holds and carries, two fingers turn the base board on its turntable, and a two-finger tap undoes. Without a Pencil, a long press turns your finger into the knife.

In your browser, on your device. Autosave is on by default, so whatever is on the table is already kept; you can switch it off in Settings → Work. Nothing is uploaded, so export what matters: clearing the site’s data in your browser clears your works too.

Yes. Your models, photos and exported files are yours, including for paid work such as a model for a client, a competition entry or a laser-cut kit.