Hardcraft 0.8.0-alpha.2

Hardcraft — a Blender add-on for retopology of CAD exports (Plasticity bridge / STEP / OBJ) into clean quad/tri meshes.

This is a working tool used on real production retopology, not a finished product. Read what works and what is rough before testing, and please only feed it raw Plasticity exports / STEP files — edited meshes lose the metadata detection needs.

What's new since alpha.1

A maintenance pass on top of the Cover release, worth updating to before testing:

• Every message is English now. Operator reports, error texts and the diagnostic log were a Russian/English mix — all user-facing text is English, so the Copy diagnostics / Copy last error blocks you send back are readable end to end.
• Re-import CAD works on an empty target. Re-importing a .stp before the first patch was built used to silently drop the new import into the scene as a copy and change nothing; now the source swap (rename + hidden "HC old" bookkeeping + session rebind) happens exactly like on a working target.

The headline feature is unchanged from alpha.1: Cover — one live patch over a whole group of surfaces (select a connected group, Alt+F). Details: PATCH → Cover.

Full list: changelog.

Files

file	what	SHA-256
hardcraft-0.8.0-alpha.2.zip	the add-on, Blender 5.0+ (one zip for all versions)	0374D14EA1EF250D8527F9448A54F3BA1C8E7B2806ECC1463BD0ACE905780AD6
hardcraft-cadtools-1.1.0-win64.exe	optional CAD converter for STEP import, Windows — UPDATED 2026-09-02: speaks converter protocol 2, which every add-on since 0.4.0-alpha.5 requires. If you have 1.0.0 installed and see "CAD converter protocol 1, addon expects 2", run this installer over it.	41AA0DFB46FA8A2F8C836AEB3497F3A7D7DB710D5C2DAA78E3DDD22DFE22313D

Install

Add-on: Blender → Edit → Preferences → Get Extensions → ⌄ → Install from Disk… → pick the zip. A Hardcraft tab appears in the 3D viewport N-panel. Full guide: install. Upgrading from an earlier alpha: install the new zip the same way, it replaces the old one.

CAD Tools (only if you import STEP): run the installer. It installs per user — no administrator rights, no UAC prompt, nothing system-wide; uninstalls from Apps & features. The add-on finds it by itself. Update it if you installed CAD Tools 1.0.0 (any release before 2026-09-02): the add-on now needs converter protocol 2 and refuses the old binary with "CAD converter protocol 1, addon expects 2". Run the 1.1.0 installer over the old one — same location, it replaces it. On Windows 10 SmartScreen may warn once (More info → Run anyway); the SHA-256 above is what to verify instead.

The installer is not signed (no code-signing certificate behind this project), so SmartScreen will warn once on first run — verify the SHA-256 above instead. The converter reads STEP, writes a glb + three sidecar files into the folder the add-on gives it, and does not touch the network. It bundles OpenCASCADE 7.9.3 built from public upstream sources as replaceable shared libraries (LGPL-2.1; license text and NOTICE included in the package).

The converter's version (1.0.0) is its own, not the add-on's — the two update independently and a protocol handshake decides compatibility.