Quality and performance¶
All of the settings on this page live in the Quality & Export panel. None of them change your model — they change how it is displayed and how it is baked.
Display quality¶
| Setting | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Linear | Maximum deviation between the display mesh and the exact surface |
| Curvature | Maximum angular deviation, in degrees |
Lower values mean a finer display mesh and slower updates. Curved surfaces are the ones that notice; a model made only of flat faces is largely unaffected.
These settings do not affect STEP export, which writes exact surfaces rather than triangles. See Import and export.
Previews¶
| Setting | Trade-off |
|---|---|
| Fast Modifier Preview | Approximates modifier results while you drag |
| Live Boolean Preview | Approximates boolean results while you drag |
| Show Boolean Ghost Preview | Shows the cutting shape as a ghost. Only available while Live Boolean Preview is on |
These affect what you see during a drag, never the committed result. When you release, the kernel computes the shape exactly. If a preview looks wrong — a boolean that seems not to have cut, a fillet that looks faceted — turn the preview off and check whether the final result was correct all along. It usually was.
Turning them off is also the first thing to try if dragging feels unstable.
Baking¶
Use High Quality Bake enables a second, independent pair of settings:
| Setting | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Bake Linear | Linear deviation used only when baking |
| Bake Curvature | Angular deviation used only when baking |
This exists so display quality and output quality can differ. You can work at a coarse, responsive display setting and still bake a fine mesh for rendering, without switching settings back and forth.
With High Quality Bake enabled, Bake to Mesh re-tessellates at the bake settings before generating the mesh, so the baked result is genuinely finer — it is not the display mesh smoothed after the fact.
Viewport Display¶
The Viewport Display panel is separate and affects only drawing.
| Setting | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Opacity | Face opacity |
| Use WGPU Overlay | Alternative rendering path |
| Hide Occluded Edges | Hides edges behind faces |
Hide Occluded Edges is greyed out much of the time, and that is intentional. Faces only write depth when the WGPU overlay is off and opacity is fully opaque. Outside those conditions there is no depth information for the setting to use, so it would do nothing. Rather than leave a control that silently has no effect, the add-on disables it. To use it: turn off Use WGPU Overlay and set Opacity to fully opaque.
When things feel slow¶
In rough order of what to try:
- Turn off the previews if the slowness is during dragging
- Raise Linear and Curvature if the slowness is constant and the model has many curved surfaces
- Set a rollback point partway down the Feature Tree. Everything below it stops being evaluated, which is the single most effective way to keep a long history responsive while you work on an early operation
- Split into multiple parts using Add New CAD Part. Only the active part is evaluated
Editing an operation near the top of a long Feature Tree is inherently more expensive than editing one near the bottom, because everything after it must be recomputed. This is a property of history-based CAD, not a bug.
Logging¶
The add-on's preferences (Edit > Preferences > Add-ons, expand Seamless CAD)
carry logging switches. ERROR is on by default; the rest are off.
| Setting | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Enable ERROR Logs | On by default. Leave it on |
| Enable WARN / INFO / DEBUG Logs | Progressively more verbose. DEBUG can affect performance |
| Perf Logging | Writes timing data for the preview pipeline to seamless_cad_profile.log in your OS temp directory |
The same preferences screen shows CAD Engine: Running / Not running. This reflects the actual state of the kernel process, so it is a reliable first check when nothing is computing at all.