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Set Up Your Catalog & Designer Settings

The 3D Kitchen Designer prices out of the box, but a little one-time setup makes it price accurately — and optionally lets it use your own catalog products for the parts you price precisely. This page covers the optional catalog wizard and summarizes the Designer settings tabs. It's the admin side of the Designer: you do it once, and every design after benefits.

Availability: Build plan and up (Designer is badged Beta and needs the designer-page permission).

Important: Two things are the prerequisites for any catalog-free price: a Rate Formula and at least one material. Without them, cabinets refuse to price rather than silently quoting $0. Set both up under Settings → Designer (below) before you expect real numbers.

The optional catalog wizard

The catalog wizard lets you connect your existing catalog products to the Designer so it uses them for the parts you already price precisely. It's entirely optional — catalog-free pricing works without it — but it's the path to product-backed precision.

Reach it from the Catalog link in the Designer or from the Designs list. What it does, in order:

1. Scans your products and reports what it found

The wizard reads your existing catalog and buckets your products by what they look like. It reports what it found — and, just as importantly, anything it couldn't bucket — so nothing is silently dropped. If a product doesn't fit any structural role, you'll see it called out rather than quietly ignored.

2. Runs a mapping-health report

Alongside the scan, a mapping-health report flags products whose attribute mappings silently resolve to $0. This is the subtle failure catalog-free pricing can't catch on its own: if you bind a product to a role and that product happens to compute to zero, it would override the standard math with a free part. The health report surfaces those before they reach a customer quote.

Tip: If a design quotes a cabinet at $0 even though you assigned a material, check the mapping-health report — a bound product resolving to $0 overrides the catalog-free price for that role.

3. Bind products to the eight structural roles

You bind your own products to eight structural roles. A bound role overrides catalog-free pricing and construction for those parts:

RoleCovers
CarcassThe cabinet box
Face frameStiles and rails on the front
DoorDoor fronts
Drawer frontVisible drawer faces
Drawer boxThe pull-out boxes
Toe kickThe recessed base
FillerFiller strips
End panelFinished end/skin panels

4. Generate standard cabinet families

From your bindings, the wizard generates the standard cabinet families — the base and wall cabinet types your Library offers — so you're not building each width by hand.

5. Edit each family's face program

Finally, you can edit each family's face program — the vertical band recipe (door band, drawer band, and so on) that makes the family lay out correctly at every width. This is what lets one "base cabinet" family draw the right fronts whether it's 12" or 36" wide.

Note: Binding is per role and optional. Bind only the parts you want the Designer to price from your real products (say, your doors), and leave the rest catalog-free. See Pricing a design for how the two approaches combine on one job.

Designer settings

Everything that drives catalog-free pricing lives under Settings → Designer. Here's the summary — see Designer settings for the full detail.

TabWhat it's for
MaterialsYour sheet and lumber materials, each with a unit (sq ft / bd ft / lin ft / sheet) and a rate, plus a default material. This is the library the whole-job and per-cabinet material pickers draw from.
Front ProgramsVendor door and drawer-front "programs" (recipes) you assign to doors/fronts on a job, optionally tied to a vendor.
LaborA labor-rate library (each, per hour, per cabinet, per linear/square/board foot, per job) whose entries become additive cost lines in the Rate Formula.
Rate FormulaThe single shop formula that prices every catalog-free job: material take-off × material rate, plus labor/overhead/finishing lines, all wrapped by a job margin percentage. Until you author one, catalog-free rows refuse to price.
Job DefaultsThe starting point for every new room: whether new jobs include doors & drawer fronts and drawer boxes by default. A carcass-only shop can turn these off so new rooms open without them. It's a seed — changing it never re-prices existing designs.

Important: The Rate Formula is the linchpin. No formula means no catalog-free price — the Designer shows rows as un-priced, never as a silent $0. Author the formula and at least one material and your rooms start pricing immediately.

CNC / CAM settings

If your shop wants verified G-code from the Designer's CAM nest (not just neutral DXF), that's configured separately under Settings → CNC/CAM:

  • Machine profiles — your CNC machines
  • Tool library — the tools available to post against
  • G-code output settings — turning G-code on

Neutral DXF works with none of this. G-code requires G-code enabled + a posted machine + a tool, plus the operator accepting a disclaimer at export time. See CNC / CAM settings and the DXF Layer Convention.

Setup checklist

  1. Settings → Designer → Materials — add at least one material with a rate, and pick a default.
  2. Settings → Designer → Rate Formula — author the formula (with your job margin). Required for pricing.
  3. Settings → Designer → Labor — add labor rates you want in the formula (optional but recommended).
  4. Settings → Designer → Defaults — decide whether new rooms include doors/fronts and drawer boxes.
  5. (Optional) Catalog wizard — bind products to roles, review mapping health, generate families, edit face programs.
  6. (Optional) Settings → CNC/CAM — add a machine and tool if you want G-code.

Next Steps

PreviousFrom Design to OrderNextThe Designs Library