PoolCad Desktop Engine
A native Mac + Windows design studio: draw in 2D plan view and the photoreal 3D scene builds itself live — coping, decking, water, and terrain included.
Meet the team
Groundwork is a team of one for now — here's who's behind it, why it exists, and the work that got it here.
Founder & Engineer
I'm Justin, and I built PoolCad alone — not assembled-from-frameworks alone, actually alone.
The renderer is hand-written OpenGL. The modeling core runs on OpenCASCADE: true solids and real volumes, not meshes pretending. There's a finite-element solver in there so a shell design means something to the engineer who has to sign off on it. The terrain comes off a drone scan of the actual yard. When Groundwork shows you a pool, it's giving you the geometry, the quantities, and the structure — not just a pretty picture.
Most pool software is sales software: it renders the dream, then hands the hard part to someone else. I wanted the dream and the hard part in the same file. [Your origin here: how you got into pools and design software — the moment existing tools weren't good enough.]
People ask how one person builds a CAD engine. The same way you earn a black belt or train as a competitive diver: show up every day, respect the fundamentals, and don't skip the boring parts. I've worked since I was a kid — discipline is the only talent I trust.
[Optional: a line about school or what you're studying, if you want it here.] Groundwork is that discipline pointed at one problem — giving designers and builders a tool that's fast, honest, and actually buildable, and that they own.
A native Mac + Windows design studio: draw in 2D plan view and the photoreal 3D scene builds itself live — coping, decking, water, and terrain included.
CAD-kernel solids, tetrahedral meshing, and finite-element analysis under the hood — so a pretty picture is also a buildable, permit-ready plan.
Procedural grass, terrain, water caustics and reflections rendered live — the backyard looks like a place, not a diagram.
The public face of Groundwork — and eventually the account portal and licensing backbone for the whole suite.
I'm always glad to talk with designers, builders, and fellow graphics and CAD nerds — about pools, rendering, kernels, or where this is headed.
Say hello