solidcraft (tangency-labs) errors

42 recurring problems engineers report in solidcraft (tangency-labs), ranked by impact.

#360 by errors trackedMCADVerification

Recurring solidcraft (tangency-labs) errors, by impact

  1. 1A FreeCAD PartDesign Body that FreeCAD calls one valid solid opens in SolidCraft as 5 open bodies with no volume, because the importer reads every intermediate shape in the archive, sketches included.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  2. 2A hole pattern feature drew 18 vent holes (6x3 grid of 6 mm) and cut almost none of them: 18 holes should have removed 1,221 mm3, measured removal was 124 mm3. The timeline shows no error or warning, and the snapshot still draws all 18 hole circles, which makes it easy to trust by eye and miss in checking.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  3. 3A large sketch imported from Fusion 360 into SolidCraft stalls on extrude, showing computing indefinitely and never finishing the operation.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  4. 4A STEP export from SolidCraft lost the side faces on 3 of 4 tapered legs when opened in other CAD tools, leaving only end discs. SolidCraft read its own file back fine; the fault was which ring of the cone face the loop started on, which other readers depend on.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  5. 5Cylinder, modelled M10 thread, then Shell on an end face: Shell fails because the faceted thread leaves the body as triangles, not a valid solid, so fillets and booleans downstream fail too. The reporter argues the 'temporary' faceted cut will harden into a ceiling.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  6. 6Extruding a connector boss up to the enclosure face with Join merged the enclosure into the connector body and took the connector name, so every later feature referencing the enclosure faces failed and the PCB sketched on it disappeared.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  7. 7Faces bounded by a single vertex (closed spheres, cone tips, the way Parasolid writes them) do not import. The reporter's bearings exported from Onshape came in with no balls, with no error; the faces are just gone.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  8. 8Imported STEP files cannot stay linked to their source, so re-exporting a changed KiCad board means deleting the import and re-inserting it, losing whatever was attached to it.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  9. 9Onshape writes small blends as a degenerate torus surface, which is not supported, so those faces drop and the body comes in open. A connector and two supplier enclosure parts arrived open, 46 open bodies in one file.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  10. 10solidcraft-cli 0.23.0 imports an OCCT-valid machined frame (planar walls, slots, blind holes) as an open body; eval exits 0 but reports closed:false, volume null, center of mass null, total volume -0.0, and a downstream tool (Gimli) then fails deserializing the null.Verification · Agent failure · 1 report74
  11. 11STEP export writes cylinder faces as analytic surfaces but their boundary circles as rational B-splines with no pcurves; OCCT projects them itself and lands about 8.1e-5 mm off at R31.5 against a 1e-7 mm edge tolerance. All 44 circular edges on a flange fail FreeCAD's strict check, and booleans and fillets downstream can misbehave.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  12. 12A 97-step 90 x 144 mm enclosure body built in SolidCraft 0.16/0.18 now fails at DeleteFace1 because a merged-face reference no longer exists as it was picked, and one cut is refused with a 1.7e-5 Bad Gap. Design intent saved as face references breaks across tool versions. Same family as two earlier issues.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  13. 13A B-spline face whose side shrinks to a point fails with 'face boundary is not a closed loop', and on a real boat hull exported from FreeCAD both bottom panels disappeared with no error on the import feature. The workaround is to cut a 0.2% sliver off the pointed end of each panel before export.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  14. 14A BOM CSV part numbered '=1+1' opened in a spreadsheet as 2, and a '-5 mm shim' description showed as #NAME?. Fixed by escaping, a small example of how often the BOM still ends up in a spreadsheet.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  15. 15A builder can't find a STEP model for a 1.51 inch AMOLED module and asks for outline, FPC position and rear components "for mechanical integration and enclosure design." Separately, in SolidCraft, a joint origin placed on a header of one imported GNSS board STEP lands on the other board instead. The import logged 10 geometry warnings.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  16. 16A CAD interference check reported a PCB sitting in the open cavity of a watch case as a 750 mm3 clash, the board's whole volume. Suppressing the rim fillet made it go away. The fine fillet mesh pushed the case past 80,000 triangles, a shortcut check bailed out, a shifted retry classified the board as inside, and the membership check returned no opinion above 60,000 triangles, which the caller counted as a pass.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  17. 17A fillet fails with "both faces next to the edge must be planar" on a part the user built easily in Onshape.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  18. 18A Gridfinity bin built in Fusion 360 and imported as STEP split into three with two pieces moved together, and the Join then computed forever and never finished, with no command error recorded.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  19. 19A Poppy Humanoid STEP assembly had 59 of 95 distinct solids refused on import, and the file writes edges up to 9 um off their faces while stating 0.01 um tolerance.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  20. 20A sketch placed on a face lands a few hundredths of a micron off and tilted about 1 urad, so after extrude and union the faces do not merge and the exported STEP carries sliver faces.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  21. 21A user cannot open SolidWorks SLDPRT files in another CAD tool.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  22. 22A user Combine fails with unknown body when a tool body is suppressed for a variant, where NX just skips it. A CAD modeling failure on variant-suppressed tool bodies.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  23. 23A user coming from SolidWorks cannot edit a part inside a sub-assembly and cannot reference a hole axis on another part when sketching.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  24. 24A user imported a STEP from Onshape into solidcraft, sketched, and tried an extrude cut. The boolean failed because the fallback only handles planar faces where bodies meet, and the target had 115 curved faces.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  25. 25After a shell on a tapered, filleted box, four inner corner fillet edges miss their surface by up to 0.0198 mm. SolidCraft shows the body and re-imports it without complaint; FreeCAD 1.1.4, used as an outside reader, flags the four faces as invalid.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  26. 26An enclosure lid with a button part exported from another CAD fails to join every way round with 'no result', and the error gives no hint about the cause. Workaround is to keep it as a separate body.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  27. 27An RFC to refuse a Join when the new material doesn't touch the body, citing five earlier reports of bodies ending up in pieces without anyone meaning it, including one where a Combine Intersect silently removed a whole body made of seven separate spheres.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  28. 28Booleans on lofted B-spline bodies are 1 to 2 orders of magnitude slower than on prismatic bodies, and a join between bodies sharing faces of the same loft fails after 5 min 11 s with 'no result', while the same part builds fine in FreeCAD/OCCT.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  29. 29In a browser CAD app, inserting a linked assembly brought it in as a single part, so its parts could not be counted in the BOM. Insert Design put every body of the linked design into one component. The fix brings a linked design in as a subassembly with one occurrence per placement, counts each occurrence in the BOM and mass properties, and makes Update Links follow renames and deletions upstream.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  30. 30In an MCP-driven modelling session, measuring a PCB face against a case face fails unless the caller passes a point on the face. Once a joint moves the body, the agent has to compute that point in the new position just to name a face it already identified by index.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  31. 31In solidcraft a 48 mm extrude with Join failed with the join could not be computed reliably, while the same extrude as a new body worked. The kernel refused rather than keep a wrong result, and the message warns the preview may still show the last valid geometry.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  32. 32Many CAD programs draw a tray's flat with thin V corner reliefs that run across both bend zones, but sheet.fold refuses the first fold and suggests moving the fold line, which cannot work because the V crosses every zone that width. Flats drawn in another tool do not fold here.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  33. 33REMC19 can't add material to a sheet metal flange without breaking the unfold, and asks for a SolidWorks-style Tab feature.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  34. 34Sectioning conic rounds, the kind SolidWorks exports for conic fillets, returns two straight chords per round, up to 0.435 mm off the true section, with profile area 0.7% short. Imported geometry quietly loses accuracy in the next tool.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  35. 35Sketching on a face fails after modeled threaded holes because the history cannot tell the face apart from other faces.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  36. 36SolidCraft chokes on a STEP import that FreeCAD handles fine.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  37. 37SolidCraft's AI assistant working across several open CAD files keeps hitting '(cancelled)' and only resumes after several prompts, because its context is tied to a tab, not to the design.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  38. 38Switching design tabs leaves per-design state in one shared app object that names things by number or name (component 1, Body1) that every design reuses, so after a switch it silently points at the other design's items; eight cases are confirmed by failing tests, and the worst ones edit, rename or delete parts of the design you switched to.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  39. 39Two hand-typed file-open lists fell behind the format registry, so the web picker misses IGES and Start and Import misses FreeCAD and Rhino files even though the app reads both.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  40. 40Two STEP readers measured on 320 files: solidcore drops repeated placements so cylinder_twice is half its volume, while SolidCraft refuses 23 files. A STEP reader comparison with concrete volume and refusal failures.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  41. 41A SolidCraft user patterned a revolve cut 6 times and waited about 1.5 minutes for it to finish, while SolidWorks and FreeCAD get through the same model in a few seconds.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report58
  42. 42An extrude cut on a big CadQuery STEP of a brick facade with thousands of faces takes about 140 seconds in SolidCraft.MCAD · Agent failure · 1 report58

How it fails

  1. Agent failure42

Engineering tools that address these errors

Sourced from public community reports. Costs and delays on individual entries are modeled estimates, not measurements.