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Hardcraft

Alpha

Hardcraft is in alpha. It is developed against real production retopo work and changes fast: defaults get re-tuned, and features land behind switches before they become the default path. Read Known issues before planning a job around it — notably there is no streaming, so a re-exported CAD does not update existing retopo work.

Hardcraft is a Blender add-on that turns a dirty CAD export into a clean game-ready mesh. Feed it a STEP file from any CAD — or a live Plasticity bridge export — and what arrives is triangle soup with a CAD topology hidden inside. Hardcraft reads that topology and hands back quads where quads belong and triangles where they don't.

It is not a generic remesher and not an all-quad retopologizer. It reads the CAD structure that the export still carries, splits the surface into patches and curves, and lets you steer the mesh per patch with a few gestures.

CAD source bridge / STEP Detect patches, curves PATCH select & fill CURVE cut & tweak Commit weld, UV

What it actually does

Boundary is CAD truth, interior is free. Patch boundaries are refit onto the CAD surface and kept rigid; the interior is unwrapped and filled. That split is what makes a mixed quad/tri result safe — the silhouette comes from the CAD, not from a fill heuristic.

Quads only where they earn it. Curved surfaces get structured grids, tubes and lofts. Flat faces, features and cut-outs get triangles. A fillet band gets the loop flow you would draw by hand. When the CAD split is finer than the mesh you want, Cover lays one patch over a connected group of faces (Alt+F).

Everything is a parametric tweak, not a destructive edit. Span counts, density, contour, inset, force-tri — and the relax/soft-move brush dabs — are stored per patch in a sidecar on the mesh datablock. They survive undo, save, and re-fill — so late changes stay cheap.

Any CAD, one contract. A STEP file from any modeller and a raw Plasticity bridge export both carry the face metadata detection needs; STEP also carries surface types, seams and the CAD UV. See CAD sources for what each path gives up.

Where to go next

  • Install — the add-on, and the separate CAD converter binary the STEP path needs.
  • Quick start — first clean mesh in about ten minutes.
  • PATCH / CURVE — the two working modes, gesture by gesture.
  • Fill types — what smart fill, quad and loft each build, and which knobs they give you.
  • Keymap and Settings — generated from the source, so they cannot drift.
  • Reporting a problem — this is an alpha; the panel collects the details of a report for you, as text you read before you send it.