Chapter 10 — Tips & Troubleshooting

Quick answers to the questions that come up most often, plus performance tuning and what to do when something looks wrong.

Performance

"The viewport feels sluggish."

The biggest perf knob is Quality (toolbar dropdown):

Low / Medium — interactive feel during heavy editing (drag profile points, place primitives, sculpt with pottery wheel).
High — the default for most editing. Full texture detail, reasonable refresh.
VeryHigh / Ultra — for final inspection or export. Slow refresh during editing.

If you're dragging profile points or doing pottery work, drop to Medium. The mesh re-builds 4–6× faster and you can iterate without lag. Bump back to High before export.

"Multi-Object Loft is slow."

The SDF mesher runs at the same Quality setting as the analytical loft. Low quality = 48³ voxel grid (~110 k voxels); Ultra = 256³ (~17 M voxels). Crank smoothness too high and you also pay for extra Taubin smoothing iterations on the resulting mesh.

Tuning advice:

For editing: Quality Medium, Smoothness 0.5. Mesh rebuilds in ~0.5 s.
For export: Quality High or VeryHigh, Smoothness 0.7. Mesh rebuilds in ~3–5 s.

"Pattern Graph Editor feels laggy."

Every parameter slider streams @oninput — every drag tick triggers a mesh rebuild. With heavy textures (1024² heightmap bake) this can back up. Use the Quality dropdown to drop to Medium during editing.

The editor has a ▶ Apply button that explicitly re-renders the mesh — useful when live-preview lagged behind a fast sequence of edits.

Visual artifacts

"The vase has a vertical seam down the back."

This is the cylinder seam at theta=0 ≡ theta=2π. Three causes:

Non-integer Cells Around — the pattern doesn't repeat an exact number of times, so theta=0 doesn't match theta=2π. DigitalClay3D rounds Cells Around to integer automatically, so this should never happen with the built-in patterns. If you're authoring a custom graph, set Sine Frequency to a positive integer.
Texture amplitude clipping — at very high amplitudes the bumps collide or the heightmap clamps. Drop the Texture Amplitude.
UV Rotation — non-zero UV rotation breaks strict u-periodicity. The seam-blend pass hides most of it; if it's still visible at high rotation, set rotation to a multiple of 360°/CellsAround.

"I see voxel-grid pebbling on a Multi-Object Loft."

The SDF mesher places vertices on a regular voxel grid, which can read as fine bumps on the surface. Two fixes:

Crank Surface Smoothness to 0.7+. Each iteration runs Taubin smoothing (preserves volume) so high values don't shrink the vase.
Bump Quality. Higher resolution = smaller voxels = smaller bumps. Medium or High looks dramatically cleaner than Low.

"STL export looks different from the viewport."

A few things only run at export time:

Surface effects with Cut Through — the through-hole topology is more aggressive at export (higher resolution, more triangles).
Texture amplitude — the export uses the full 1024² heightmap; the viewport may use 512² on mobile / low-RAM hosts.
Quality difference — viewport quality and export quality are independent. If your viewport is at Medium but export is at Ultra, the export is ~3× more detailed.

Modelling questions

"How do I make a tall narrow neck?"

In Revolution mode, drag the upper profile points inward. The X axis of each profile point is radius fraction (0 = centerline, 1 = max diameter). For a narrow neck, the upper 20 % of points should have X ≈ 0.1–0.2.

In Multi-Object Loft mode, set the upper layers' single primitive to small Width/Height (e.g. 0.15 each).

"How do I close the top?"

Wall & Floor → uncheck Open Top. The mesh's upper WallThickness band gets sealed into a dome — perfect for sealed bottles or sculptural forms.

"My mesh has a hole where the rim should be."

Two causes:

Wall Thickness too small at the current voxel resolution (Multi-Object Loft only). The engine clamps thin walls to at least 1.5 × voxel-spacing to keep them resolvable. If your wall is thinner than that and Quality is Low, the rim might be missing. Bump Quality.
Bottom Thickness > Height — the entire interior is "below the floor", so no cavity. Reduce Bottom Thickness.

"How do I print the inside surface texture too?"

You can't — DigitalClay3D's texture pass only displaces the outer surface (and skips the inner cavity). This is a deliberate choice for clay printing where the interior is invisible and printers struggle with detailed inside walls.

If you absolutely need inside texture, model the part as a solid (uncheck Closed Solid), texture it, then post-process to hollow in Blender.

File / save / load issues

"The Save dialog doesn't pop up."

On the desktop app, three save paths are tried in order:

MAUI native FileSaver (Windows / macOS).
Browser File System Access API.
Anchor-download fallback (file lands in Downloads).

If you're not seeing a dialog, you're probably in path 3 — check your Downloads folder. The Settings dialog's Library Folder field stays separate from this and isn't affected.

"I can't open my old `.cc` file."

Use File → Import as Template → Clayon Project (.cc)…, not File → Open. .cc files aren't DigitalClay3D's native format; they need to go through the Clayon import path which translates them.

"The library lost my projects."

Settings → Defaults → Library Folder shows the active folder. Did it change recently? Click ⟳ to reset to the default (~/Documents/DigitalClay Projects/). Your .t3d files are real folders/files on disk — they don't disappear unless someone deleted them.

Where to get more help

Email: support@cosmicbluecreations.com