Guides
Quality & mesh
Draft → High, voxels, Grid vs Fine tet.
Quality tiers
- Draft (Free+) — ~2.5 mm default (usable shape, not LEGO blocks). Use for BC sanity and direction checks.
- Standard (Maker+) — ~1.25 mm default. Everyday studies.
- High (Workshop+) — ~1 mm default. Finer features, higher credits.
Finer voxels than the tier default raise credits roughly with 1/size³. See Subscription for plan unlocks.
Grid vs Fine tet
- Grid — adaptive Cartesian HEX8 (default for Lighten): finer cells near the CAD skin and holes, coarser shared density in the solid core. Still SIMP topology — not a different solver.
- Fine tet — Maker+ body-fit TET10 for Stress check, or Lighten via BESO on the tet mesh (no hex design grid).
- HEXmesh — Enterprise body-fit hex (O-grid / mapped when sweepable). Prefer Grid or Fine tet for typical Lighten parts.
Organic mesh (free post-process)
After topology, Exoform extracts a printable isosurface (marching cubes). On Draft it upsamples the density field, Gaussian-prefilters, then Taubin-smooths the mesh — seconds of CPU, no extra credits, and not a TET10 remesh. Raise Smooth organic mesh in Setup for softer walls; set 0 to keep sharp preserved holes.
Practical rule
Prove Supports/Loads on Draft → then raise quality once displacement direction and order-of-magnitude stress look right. A beautiful High mesh of a wrong load case is still wrong.
Liked a Draft topology direction? On the study detail page use Refine further → Standard/High — it prolongates the prior density onto the finer grid (cheaper than a cold re-solve). FEA studies get Re-run analysis at the finer mesh.