Troubleshooting

Nothing here matching? The panel can collect the details of a report for you — see Reporting a problem.

Nothing happens when I press a key

The keys are tool-scoped. They exist only while HC Target is the active tool in Edit Mode. If the panel shows a red "HC Target tool not active" box, click Activate HC Target in it.

Then check the select mode: PATCH is 4, CURVE is 5. Most actions are mode-specific and say so in the status line — C in PATCH is circle-select, not a region split.

Read the status line

Almost every "it refused to do the thing" is explained in one sentence in the viewport status line.

The patches make no sense

Detection reads CAD metadata baked into the export. If the mesh has been edited, separated, joined, re-extracted or otherwise touched, that metadata is gone and detection falls back to guessing from geometry.

Re-export the part raw and start again. Do not debug detection on an edited mesh — you are debugging the wrong thing.

"This mesh carries no readable CAD metadata (face_ids/groups)" — New Target saying the same thing up front: the mesh you pointed it at is not a raw export (or is not CAD at all). Nothing was built; re-export the part raw and retarget.

STEP import

"CAD converter not found" — nothing resolved. Check the path list in Install; the panel prints which converter would run every time you are in Object Mode.

"CAD converter could not start" — usually a bare .exe copied out of its folder. Copy the whole unpacked folder, executable plus libraries.

Protocol mismatch — the converter is older or newer than the add-on expects. Update the binary. This is checked before conversion, deliberately, instead of half-importing a mesh.

Faces are missing after import. Plasticity writes some swept surfaces as OFFSET_SURFACE, which OCCT will not load — re-export with convert analytics to NURBS (CAD sources). A missing face also shows up later: Cover refuses with "open edge on the rim" when a covered patch borders nothing on one side. If the import note said faces were LOST, that is the one — fix the import, not the cover.

The whole body shades badly. Rebuild the surfaces in Plasticity first. Import repairs local normal damage; it cannot rescue a bad surface.

Tessellation looks torn. A torn body is re-meshed automatically (only that body, at denser steps; STEP_REFINE_TORN in settings.json). If it still looks torn, the import note says so — rebuild the surface upstream.

A patch refuses to update

It is probably frozen — frozen patches are off the parametric path by design, so re-fill, span and density changes cannot touch them (that is what makes hand edits safe there). They draw tinted. Use Reset to melt one back into the parametric world.

A patch can also be waiting on a deferred rebuild after a neighbour's change — Refresh stale (panel, Patch section) sweeps the whole backlog and reports the count.

Tweaks feel sluggish on a big model

Per-tweak cost grows with the number of built patches — see Known issues.

Blender hung on a Hardcraft action

If a Hardcraft action runs longer than 20 seconds, the add-on writes where it is stuck to hardcraft_hang.log in the out folder next to the add-on's own folder (Blender's extensions/user_default/out/). It writes again every 20 seconds while the action stays stuck. Kill Blender, then attach that file to your report together with Copy diagnostics (Reporting).

The file is written only while Log to out/hardcraft.log is on in the add-on preferences (the default). It stays on your machine; nothing is sent anywhere.