Your first mandala

The studio moves through five stages, shown across the top: Prompt, Generate Source, Clean Artwork, Generate Layers, Layer Editor. You can go back to any of them at any time. Pressing a stage takes you to it: Generate Source in that row brings the Generate Source button into view in the panel on the left, outlined - the picture is made when you press that button. On Studio only one of the five ever costs anything, making the picture; on Pay as you go the first build of each new picture does too.

1. 1Describe what you want

   Open the studio and start a project. Type what you want to see — “a lotus mandala with eight petals” is plenty. Under Art direction you can pick a style and how detailed it should be. Stuck for words? The shelf of templates above the prompt box fills one in for you; narrow it with the Category list above the cards, pick one, swap the one phrase you care about in the Make it yours field, and carry on. The picture you generate from it is still uniquely yours.

2. 2Make the picture

   Press Generate Source. This costs credits, because it asks an AI for a picture. If you already have a design, upload it instead and this step costs nothing.

3. 3Clean it up

   The studio turns your picture into flat black and white, because that boundary is what gets cut. Usually the defaults are right. If the result looks muddy, the cleaning page covers the two controls that fix it.

4. 4Set your material and build the stack

   Choose how many layers you want - four is a good first stack, see how many layers - and how big the piece should be, tell it your sheet thickness so the 3D preview matches your wood, then press Generate Layers. This is geometry rather than AI, and it takes a minute or two. On Studio every build is included; on Pay as you go the first build of a picture costs 250 credits, and the button says so before you press it. Every rebuild of the same picture after that is free, so rebuild as often as you like.

5. 5Check it, then export

   Every build is checked on its own, and the result is in the Validation tab on the right; Validate runs the check again. It looks for the things that go wrong on a cutter — pieces that would fall out, details too fine to survive. Fix anything it flags, rebuild, then download your files with Download All (.zip).

How long it takes

Making the picture takes under a minute, and cleaning it a few seconds. Building the layers is real geometry: a minute or two for a typical piece, and several minutes for a very detailed one at a large size, with a box over the canvas saying which layer it has reached. The part that takes real time is deciding you like the picture, which is why Low quality costs a fraction of High — see Credits and plans.

Common first questions