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Reporting a problem

This is an alpha, and the thing that makes a report actionable is not how well you describe the mesh — it is the address: which build, which settings, which patch, which faces. Three buttons collect that for you.

They live in the N-panel → Hardcraft → Dev section (collapsed by default — open it once and it stays open).

No telemetry, ever

Every button writes text to your clipboard. Nothing is uploaded and nothing runs in the background. You paste the block into a report — or you read it and decide not to. (The add-on keeps a plain debug log next to its own files; Preferences → Logging switches it off.)

Which button

Copy diagnostics — attach this to any report.

The build and Blender version, your OS, the settings you have off default, what is built in the file, and how much of it you had to fix by hand. The off-default line matters more than it looks: without it a turned knob and a real bug are indistinguishable from this side.

Report selected faces — for "this mesh is wrong". Edit Mode only.

Select the faces you are complaining about, then press it (or F3 → HC: Report Selected Faces). You get the patch's fill kernel, any strategy override, the boundary shape and per-side spans, the lattice state, and one line per selected face: kind, valences, depth from the rim, which boundary side each vertex sits on, the sharpest rim angle it touches, seams.

It judges nothing — it measures, in units of that patch's own edge length, and leaves the verdict to the reader. A selection that straddles two patches is reported against both, so a complaint about a seam does not get blamed on one side.

Copy last error — after something failed, or a red banner appeared.

Add-on tracebacks go to the Blender system console, which you almost certainly do not have open, so they are lost by default. This keeps a copy of the last few and hands them over with the build stamp attached.

What is in a block — and what is not

Counts and settings. No object names, no file paths, no coordinates, no geometry. Nothing in a block can be turned back into your model, which is the point: you can work under NDA and still send a useful report.

It is plain text, so read it before you send it. If you find something in there that you would not want to share, that is a bug in the tool — report that.

If a problem genuinely cannot be shown without the geometry, that is a separate and explicit conversation, not something a button does behind your back.

What makes a report land

  • One complaint at a time. Two problems in one message become zero fixed problems.
  • Raw CAD. Detection reads metadata that only survives in an unmodified Plasticity/STEP import. On an edited, joined or re-extracted mesh the results are garbage and the report points at the wrong thing entirely. See CAD sources.
  • Say what you expected. "Wrong" is a verdict; "I expected the fillet band to keep one row across the corner" is a specification.
  • A screenshot of the viewport for anything visual — the face report gives the numbers, the picture gives the intent.
  • If you already fixed it by hand, say so. A patch you corrected yourself, sitting next to the one the tool produced, is the single most valuable thing you can send: it turns "this looks bad" into a target.

Where to send it

Back the same way you got the build. Paste the block as text — not a screenshot of the block, which cannot be searched, diffed or quoted.