Miracle-Grue (Beta)

A Magic Toolpathing software. A bag of soil for growing 3d objects. A green thing found in twisty turny passages.

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Welcome to Miracle Grue (Beta)

We at MakerBot have lost entire lifetimes waiting for things to slice. It's like being eaten by a Grue, but slowly. Several times a day. Every day.

To save our own lives and sanity, we are creating a new slicing engine. It will never be perfect, it will never be closed source, and it will always be fast.

Miracle-Grue is a slicing tool for turning STL and OBJ files into GCode toolpaths. It is designed to be used as part of a larger software package, but we are also making it available as a command line tool.

How to Get Started Using Miracle-Grue

If you want to use Miracle-Grue, you can download the binaries from and install them on your computer. From there you can use the command line to slice your 3D files into GCode toolpaths.

How to Get Started Hacking Miracle-Grue

Pre Reqs

First you'll need to install QTCreator (or the QTSDK, if you're ambitious) on your favorite OS.

Then clone Miracle-Grue, using recursive cloning, to your local machine. That will look like this: 'git clone --recursive git@github.com:makerbot/miracle-grue.git' Then simply open miracle-grue.pro in QTCreator and build it. So simple! Unless you forget the --recursive, in which case you will need to get the submodules imported correctly on your own.

We also have a simple test UI for debugging and testing. You can find it in the project file miracle-gui.pro. It's for engineering use only, so don't expect it to be amazing (or bug-free).

Authors and Contributors

If you want to contact us, or suggest bugfixes, features, or other tasks, please join our developers mailing list. This software is developed and maintained by MakerBot Industries, by Joe Sadusk (@jsadusk) with Far(@FarMcKon) and other MakerBot crew. The foundation for the project was begun by Hugomatic (@hugomatic)