VectorAll for Blender Handbook version 1.1.0 · beta.2 Windows · Blender 5.2 LTS

Every control, what it does,
and what it will not do.

A complete reference: the five modes and how they combine, every setting with its default, the problems we know about and are working on, and the things the add-on simply does not do. Nothing here is aspirational.

Three add-ons share this engine. Illustration draws flat colour and tones, Drafting draws measured work and sections, Plotter draws for a machine holding a pen. They produce identical lines; they differ in which kinds of drawing they offer.

Thank you for testing this

Every figure and every number here was measured on a real scene, on one machine. Yours is the second. That is the whole point of this round: nobody has yet installed VectorAll anywhere but the computer it was written on, and until somebody does, “it works” is a claim rather than a fact.

So the unglamorous reports are the valuable ones — an add-on that refuses to enable, a panel that reads as gibberish, a wording you had to guess at, an export that took twenty minutes. A bug you can point at is worth more than a compliment, and a confusing sentence is worth as much as a crash, because it is cheaper to fix and it stops more people.

Thank you for the time. It is genuinely the part that cannot be done alone.

Read this first: this is a beta, and parts of it are held back on purpose

Version 1.1.0 beta. Several defaults are set low deliberately, so that a round of testing stays fast enough to actually finish. If you meet one of these, it is what this build is meant to do and not a fault — please do not lose an evening to it:

Preview draws at reduced size, not at export quality. It answers “is this the right drawing”, not “is this the finished one”. Judge quality from an exported SVG.
Render Samples defaults to 16, which is low. Colours and tones are sampled from a real render, and 16 keeps that render down to seconds. Blotchy tones usually mean this number rather than the mode.
Denoising is off and the seed is pinned, so the same scene gives the same colours twice. Repeatability was chosen over smoothness, and it costs grain.
Supersample defaults to 2. 4 is smoother and slower. The default is the compromise, not the ceiling.
Shaded Illustration is the roughest mode here, and is known to be. It ships in the free Illustration add-on so that it can be tested, not because it is finished.
Heavy scenes are a wait. A 1.9-million-triangle interior is about a minute at preview size. The progress bar is telling the truth.
Windows and Blender 5.2 LTS only. There are no compiled parts, so other platforms may well work — they are simply untested, and a report from one is welcome.

What is not held back: the geometry, the line classification, the occlusion, the fills, the sections, and the file that comes out. Those are the finished article, and a defect there is a real one.

Section 15 lists every problem already known about, with numbers against it. Section 16 lists what the add-on does not do at all.

Beta support is deliberately self-service. Report problems through the form opened by the add-on. Individual support and a personal reply are not promised during the beta, but every submitted report is read.

Choose the job, not a tier

These are three focused interfaces over the same renderer. All are free during the public beta, and all may be installed together.

VectorAll Illustration

Flat editable colour, simplified tones and matching a rendered appearance.

Get Illustration on Gumroad

VectorAll Drafting

Technical drawings, sections, hidden lines and eight standard views.

Get Drafting on Gumroad

VectorAll Plotter

Physical pens, fewest lifts, exact size, pen travel and DXF.

Get Plotter on Gumroad

All three buttons open the VectorAll product on Gumroad, which handles access and delivers the ZIP files. No ZIP archive is hosted on this handbook site.

Before you begin

Platform	Windows 10 / 11 only. The engine has no compiled parts, so macOS and Linux are possible, but they are untested and unsupported.
Blender	5.2 LTS. Written against that release and tested on nothing else.
Dependencies	None. Nothing is downloaded at install time and nothing is pip-installed. This matters more than it sounds: the dependency installer is where the competing section add-on collects most of its bug reports.
Renderer	Not needed for lines and flat colour. Needed for Shaded Illustration and Match Render Appearance, which measure a Cycles render.
Install	Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install, pick the zip, tick it. The panel appears in the 3D viewport sidebar (`N`) under the VectorAll tab.
Licence	GPL-3.0-or-later. The full text ships inside the add-on.

The input: an ordinary Blender scene, shaded and lit however you like. Nothing has to be prepared, converted or tagged — the drawing is made from the geometry and the materials that are already there.

Five minutes to a drawing

Point a camera at what you want drawn. The drawing comes from a camera you name, never from the viewport, so that the same file gives the same drawing tomorrow.
Open the sidebar with N and choose the VectorAll tab. Pick your camera at the top.
Press Check Scene. It looks for the things that ruin a drawing before you spend time on one: a camera that sees nothing, transparent materials, negative scale, a missing world.
Press Preview. It draws at reduced size and shows the result in an image editor. There is a progress bar and a Cancel button; Escape works too.
Choose a mode and adjust Detail until the drawing says what you want, then set the output path and press Export SVG.

A heavy scene takes time. A two-million-triangle interior is about a minute at preview size. The progress bar is telling the truth; nothing has crashed.

Step 4. The readout under Detail names the four thresholds it is setting, in degrees and millimetres, so the slider is never a mystery number. Preview runs in the background: the bar moves, Cancel works, and Escape works.

The five output modes

A mode is not a skin. The five differ in what they contain, and the contents genuinely conflict — a technical drawing wants the hidden work shown and the appearance suppressed; an illustration wants exactly the reverse. Choosing a mode sets ten settings at once, and the panel lists which ones it just changed.

Mode	Fills	Tones	Hidden	Materials	Detail	Scale
Illustration	yes	1	no	yes	0.45	no
Shaded Illustration	yes	3	no	yes	0.40	no
Clean Outline	no	1	no	no	0.35	no
Plotter	no	1	no	no	0.30	yes
Technical	no	1	yes	yes	0.80	yes

All five switch on silhouettes, object boundaries and creases. Every mode uses smooth chaining except Plotter, which covers the edges in the fewest trails instead.

Illustration Illustration

One flat area per material with the outlines over it. Every shape is selectable, every colour is one swatch, and there are no gradients or clipping masks to fight in Illustrator.

Use it for product pages, diagrams, icon sets, colour-coded parts.

Illustration. One flat area per material, outlines over it. Every panel, window and rubber seal is a separate selectable shape with a single swatch — no gradients, no clipping masks.

Shaded Illustration Illustration

The same, plus a shadow and a highlight tone per shape, measured from a render and applied as tints of the material colour — so a red panel in shadow stays that red, darkened. Evenly lit shapes stay flat.

Use it for illustrations that must read as three-dimensional and stay editable. Needs a scene that renders.

Shaded Illustration. The same flat shapes, plus a measured shadow tone tinted from each shape's own colour. Evenly lit shapes are left flat rather than given an invented shadow. This is the roughest mode in the beta.

Clean Outline all three

The shape and nothing else. Detail runs low deliberately: with only lines carrying the drawing, every extra line costs clarity.

Use it for colouring pages, laser and vinyl cutting, logos, line-art bases to paint over.

Clean Outline. The shape and nothing else. Detail runs low on purpose: with only lines carrying the drawing, every extra line costs clarity.

Plotter Plotter

A drawing for a machine that holds a pen. Nothing filled, nothing dashed, one pen per layer, a true size on the page, and coincident strokes removed — a plotter would otherwise draw each of them twice, slowly. Detail runs low: a stroke too short to be worth its own pen-down costs two lifts to make a mark nobody can see.

Use it for pen plotters, vinyl and laser cutters, CNC.

Plotter. One pen, nothing filled, nothing dashed, coincident strokes removed — a plotter would otherwise draw each of them twice. True size on the page, so the drawn line is the cut line.

Technical Drafting

Occluded edges drawn dashed instead of discarded, a true page scale when the camera is orthographic, and the detail budget spent on geometry rather than appearance. Expect a heavier file: this mode keeps what the others throw away.

Use it for assembly and reference drawings, patent-style figures, documentation.

Technical. The occluded runs are drawn dashed instead of thrown away, and the detail budget goes to geometry rather than appearance. Expect a heavier file: this mode keeps what the others discard.

Colour: two different questions

These are not two styles. They answer different questions and both answers are correct.

Preserve Material Colours Illustration, Drafting

The colour that was authored, untouched by lighting or view transform. Read from the material — and when the base colour comes from a texture, from the median of that texture, following the actual wire from the Base Colour socket rather than grabbing the first image node it finds.

For diagrams, brand work, colour-coded parts, anything where #F21732 has to stay #F21732.

Preserve Material Colours. The authored red is the red on the page, untouched by the lamps in the room or by the view transform.

Match Render Appearance Illustration

The colour the render shows, lighting and view transform included. Renders once in a temporary scene that links your objects, samples each region through the very ownership map its outline was traced from, and deletes itself. Your scene, its engine and its passes are never written to.

The frame is read after Blender's display pipeline, so AgX, Filmic and your exposure all land in the colour.

Match Render Appearance. Each shape takes the median colour of its own pixels in a render, read after the display transform. Reading it before the transform is what made an early build four times too dark.

Render Samples defaults to 16. Each shape takes the median colour of its own pixels, so this decides how steady that colour is, not how the drawing looks. Low is usually enough. Denoising is off and the seed is pinned, so the same scene gives the same colours twice.

Detail

One slider, because the four thresholds behind it have to move together. Moving only one produces a drawing that is inconsistent with itself — fine lines around coarse shapes, or the reverse. Detail is a significance threshold, not an edge count: turning it down raises the bar a feature must clear rather than deleting every other line.

Detail	Crease over	Stroke at least	Curve within	Shape at least
0.00	75°	2.50 mm	1.20 px	40 px
0.30 — Plotter	63°	1.84 mm	0.94 px	29 px
0.35 — Clean Outline	61°	1.73 mm	0.90 px	27 px
0.40 — Shaded	59°	1.62 mm	0.86 px	26 px
0.45 — Illustration	57°	1.51 mm	0.82 px	24 px
0.80 — Technical	43°	0.74 mm	0.52 px	11 px
1.00	35°	0.30 mm	0.35 px	4 px

The stroke minimum is measured on the finished page, not in pixels, so the same Detail gives the same visual density on A4 and on A0.

Lines

Five classes, each with its own checkbox and its own pen. Every edge is drawn once, in the highest class it belongs to — silhouette, then boundary, then material, then crease. An edge that is both an outline and a fold is one line and not two.

Class	What it is	Default
Outer Silhouette	Where the surface turns away from the camera. Computed for your camera, not found in pixels.	on
Object Boundaries	An open edge — the rim of a plane or a shell with no thickness.	on
Creases	A fold sharper than the Detail threshold.	on
Material Edges	Where one material meets another on the same surface: a painted seam, not a fold.	on
Hidden Lines	The occluded runs, drawn dashed. Technical switches these on; the others leave them off.	off

Unticking a class hides those edges rather than demoting them into the next class down — which is what unticking a box is meant to mean.

Silhouette, boundary, material edge and crease, each drawn once in the highest class it belongs to. An edge that is both an outline and a fold is one line, not two stacked.

The same view with Hidden Lines on. The occluded runs are decided against a depth buffer built from the very triangles the edges come from, so the lines and the geometry cannot disagree.

How occlusion is decided

Against a depth buffer built from the same triangles the edges come from, so the lines and the geometry cannot disagree. Inter-object, self-occlusion and interpenetration are all included. The tolerance is relative to the depth at the sample, so it scales with the scene instead of breaking on large models.

Fills and tones

Filled Shapes gives one closed shape per visible object and material, named, grouped and painted in order, with holes as genuine holes and fill-rule="evenodd" set, so a hole does not depend on winding luck. Outlines are traced from coverage rather than from mesh edges, so a wheel rim comes out as a curve rather than a 24-sided polygon.

Tones Illustration

How many flat tones each shape is split into. One leaves every shape flat; two adds a shadow; three adds a highlight. Above one, the scene has to render, because the tones are measured rather than guessed.

Setting	Default	What it changes
Tones	1	1, 2 or 3 flat tones per shape.
Tone Threshold	0.05	How much a shape must actually vary in light before it is split at all. Raise it for a flatter, more graphic drawing.
Tone Strength	1.00	How far the tints move from the material colour. Changes only colours, never shapes, so it can be adjusted without the drawing moving.

The base colour is painted first and the bands over it, so any hairline between two bands shows the shape's own colour rather than bare paper.

Filled Shapes, close up. Outlines are traced from coverage rather than from mesh edges, so a wheel rim comes out as a curve and not as a 24-sided polygon, and holes are genuine holes.

Fills and hidden lines together: the dashed interior reads through the flat colour because each is its own layer, so either can be hidden or restyled in one selection.

Depth-graded line weight Drafting

Near lines heavier, far lines lighter — the oldest trick in draughtsmanship, and one no other Blender exporter examined does. Set Depth Bands to 2 or 3 and each band becomes its own named layer (__near, __mid, __far), so every far line can be selected at once in Illustrator.

Depth Contrast 0.35 by default. At zero the bands share one weight, which makes them useful purely as selections without changing the look. Hidden lines are never graded: the buffer under them holds the depth of whatever is hiding them, so grading by it would weight a ghost line by the thickness of the wall in front of it.

Depth Bands 3 with Depth Contrast raised. Each band is its own named layer — <code>__near</code>, <code>__mid</code>, <code>__far</code> — so every far line in the drawing can be selected at once in Illustrator. — Depth Bands 3 with Depth Contrast raised. Each band is its own named layer — `__near`, `__mid`, `__far` — so every far line in the drawing can be selected at once in Illustrator.

Cut sections Drafting

Press New Plane, New Box or New Slab. Each makes a wireframe object in the middle of the model, already aimed at the viewport camera, which you then move with G and turn with R like anything else. Remove Cutters deletes the ones this add-on made and nothing else.

The Cut Section panel. Cutter type, how it is aimed, which side is kept, the box's real dimensions in metres, and the anchor face that stays still while you type new ones.

Cutter	What it removes	Weight
Plane	Everything the arrow points at. The square shows where the cut lands; the cut carries on past it, so making the square smaller does not cut less.	10 vertices
Box	Everything outside the box — or everything inside it, if you switch Keep over. Inside isolates a room; outside takes a bite out of the model.	8 vertices
Slab	Everything in front of the cut, and everything more than Slab Depth behind it. This is what stops an elevation showing the whole building behind it.	14 vertices

They are wireframes made of edges and no faces, so all three together weigh thirty-two vertices, and a mesh with no faces cannot be drawn into the section it defines even by accident.

A box cutter in the viewport: eight vertices and twelve edges against a 950,000-triangle building. You can see exactly what it encloses, and it costs nothing to have there.

Keep Inside isolates what the box encloses; Keep Outside takes a bite out of the model and leaves the rest. The panel line under the anchors changes to say which one is happening.

Aiming without placing anything

Switch Aim to By Axis and choose +X, −X, +Y, −Y, +Z or −Z. The cut sits through the middle of the model facing that way, with an Offset in scene units to slide it. Nothing to place, nothing to aim — which is most of what a section actually needs.

Aim at View turns a cutter to face the viewport camera, so the half between you and the model is the half that goes.

Sizing a box by number

The panel shows the box's real dimensions, live. The anchor buttons choose which face stays still when they change: set Z to Low and typing a new height raises the ceiling without moving the floor. The anchor is the object's origin, so scaling with S grows the same way.

The cut face

A cut face appears only where the plane passes through something solid. A wall modelled as a single surface has no thickness, so it is cut as a line and there is nothing to fill. The report says so when it happens, rather than leaving you to wonder.

Where there is a cut face, its holes stay holes: a pipe cut across its length comes out as a ring, not a disc. Verified — a solid box gives one cap with no holes, a square pipe gives one cap with exactly one hole.

A plane cut through a cinema. The cut faces are filled in the cut colour and carry a heavy outline, so the cut reads forward of everything behind it.

The same on an organic model. Where the plane passes through solid tissue there is a filled cut face; where it passes through a chamber there is none, because there is nothing there to cut.

Pick a Cut Face colour that is not in your scene. The default is cyan for that reason: the first default was a brick red, and on the first real building it met it was within a few percent of that building's own walls.

A box section of a building, opened in Illustrator. The cut faces are collected in their own <code>section</code> layer, above the per-object layers, so recolouring every cut in the drawing is one click. — A box section of a building, opened in Illustrator. The cut faces are collected in their own `section` layer, above the per-object layers, so recolouring every cut in the drawing is one click.

The same building cut lower down. The cut happens before anything else looks at the geometry, so the silhouettes, the occlusion and the fills all see the cut model as though it had been built that way — not a whole building with a line drawn across it.

The cut happens before anything else looks at the geometry, so silhouettes, occlusion and fills all see the cut model as though it had been built that way. A section added at the end would have the silhouette of the whole object with a line drawn across it.

Standard views Drafting

Tick the directions you want, choose a folder and press Draw Standard Views. One SVG is written for each direction, named after the view:

Plan looks straight down and keeps the horizontal plan orthographic.
Front and Side are the two principal elevations.
Isometric foreshortens all three axes equally.
Dimetric gives two axes one scale and the third another.
Trimetric gives all three axes different foreshortening.
Plan Oblique 30° and 45° keep the plan at one true scale; height recedes at the named angle and at half depth.

The point is that they share one scale: every view is framed from the same bounding box, not each to its own silhouette. A plan and an elevation framed separately cannot be measured against each other, which is the whole reason to draw them as a set.

Standard views are drawn from generated cameras, which cannot be rendered. They use the authored material colours; render colours and tones apply to the camera view only. The panel says so when you have both switched on.

Eight drawings of the same asymmetric stepped model: plan, front, side, isometric, dimetric, trimetric, and plan oblique at 30 and 45 degrees. Every card uses the same frame and scale. — All eight outputs from one asymmetric model. The orthographic views describe it; the three axonometrics change foreshortening; the two plan obliques preserve the plan and send height back at 30° or 45°.

What is in the drawing Drafting, Plotter

Select objects in the viewport and press Leave Out. They are removed before anything is projected, so they do not hide what is behind them either — which is what leaving an object out is normally meant to mean. Put Back reverses it for the selection; Draw Everything empties the list.

Selected Objects Only is the inverse and works the same way.

Output, page and scale

Setting	Default	Notes
File	//drawing.svg	A JSON report is written beside it every time.
Also DXF Drafting, Plotter	off	One polyline per stroke, layers intact, Y upward, millimetres — for cutting and plotting. 117 lines of writer and no dependency.
Resolution	custom 1280×720	Or follow the scene render size. This is the tracing resolution, not the output size: the SVG is vector.
Page width	297 mm	The sheet the drawing is laid out on, so a length on the page means a length in the world.
Exact scale	off	1:50 by default, with 1000 mm per Blender unit. Orthographic cameras only.

An exact scale is refused on a perspective camera, deliberately. A perspective projection has no single scale, and printing one would be a false claim.

What arrives in Illustrator: your own object names, one layer each, in scene order. Every group also carries a <code>class</code> attribute, so restyling a whole category — all creases, all hidden lines — is a single selection. — What arrives in Illustrator: your own object names, one layer each, in scene order. Every group also carries a `class` attribute, so restyling a whole category — all creases, all hidden lines — is a single selection.

The same structure on a model with many parts. Each part keeps its own name and its own cut, which is what makes an exploded or animated version possible downstream.

And the finished drawing from those layers. Nothing here was drawn by hand; the greys are Shaded Illustration tones and the red and blue are the materials' own colours.

Advanced

Setting	Default	What it is for
Reuse Unchanged Work all three	on	Keeps the topology, projection and depth buffer between exports and reuses them when the geometry and camera have not changed. The key is a hash of the geometry itself, so moving one vertex is noticed. The file written is byte-identical either way.
Set Thresholds by Hand all three	off	Takes the four numbers Detail controls. While it is on, the Detail slider no longer applies.
Crease angle	53°	The dihedral angle that counts as a fold.
Minimum stroke	1.3 mm	On the page, not in pixels.
Curve tolerance	0.7 px	How far a fitted Bezier may stray.
Minimum shape	20 px	How much page a filled region must cover to earn a path.
Chaining	smooth	Smooth follows the straightest continuation through junctions — right for drawings. Fewest pen lifts minimises lifts for plotters, at the cost of zig-zag joins.
Grouping	auto	Object → material → line class. None writes one flat set of layers.
Supersample	2	Sub-pixel sampling for shape edges. 1 is faster and rougher; 4 is slower and smoother.

Recipes: combining the controls

A product illustration for a web page

Illustration + Preserve Material Colours Detail 0.45, Filled Shapes on, Tones 1 Page 297 mm, no exact scale

Flat, editable, brand-safe colour. Raise Detail towards 0.6 if the form goes soft; lower it if the linework starts burying the fills.

The same, but it must look three-dimensional

Shaded Illustration + Preserve Material Colours Tones 3, Tone Threshold 0.05, Tone Strength 1.0 Render Samples 16-32

Light the scene first. Raise Tone Threshold to 0.10 if flat surfaces are picking up shadows you do not want; lower Tone Strength if the tints are too strong for print.

A colouring page or a laser cut

Clean Outline Detail 0.30-0.35, Filled Shapes off Material Edges off, Hidden off

Turn Material Edges off so a painted seam does not become a cut line.

A measurable reference drawing

Technical + orthographic camera Detail 0.80, Hidden Lines on Exact scale 1:50, 1000 mm per unit

The scale control only wakes up on an orthographic camera. On a dense interior, Detail 0.80 with hidden lines can be more ghost than drawing — drop to 0.5, or turn Hidden off for the general view and on for the detail.

A sheet for a workshop

Technical, orthographic camera, exact scale Standard Views: plan + front + side + isometric Also DXF on

All four framed from one bounding box, so they can be measured against each other. DXF for the machine, SVG for the page.

A cutaway of an assembly

Illustration or Technical Cut with a plane, empty aimed at what to remove Depth Bands 3, Depth Contrast 0.35

The cut face gets its own fill and a heavy outline. Depth grading makes the near cut read forward of everything behind it.

Clean Outline with hidden lines on, at high Detail: a full construction drawing of a building, everything behind everything else still legible.

Technical, then restyled in Illustrator by selecting on the <code>class</code> attribute: visible lines to blue, hidden to a fine red dash. The exporter did not draw this palette — it made it selectable in two clicks. — Technical, then restyled in Illustrator by selecting on the `class` attribute: visible lines to blue, hidden to a fine red dash. The exporter did not draw this palette — it made it selectable in two clicks.

The same trick inverted: white strokes on a dark ground. Because every line is a real path in a named layer, the whole drawing re-colours without touching geometry.

Combinations to be aware of

Match Render Appearance with Filled Shapes off does nothing — there is nothing to colour. The panel warns.
Tones with Filled Shapes off is the same story: tones are bands within a fill.
Exact scale on a perspective camera is refused, not silently wrong.
Standard views with render colours or tones falls back to material colours, because a generated camera cannot be rendered.
Set Thresholds by Hand switches the Detail slider off. Changing a mode switches it back on, because a mode owns Detail.

Known problems, and what we know about them

Everything here is current, measured, and being worked on. None of it is hidden behind a feature list.

Speed on very heavy scenes open

A 1.9 million triangle cinema interior takes about a minute at preview size. That is down from ten minutes — the depth rasteriser and the face normals were rewritten to work on whole arrays instead of one face at a time — but it is still a wait.

measured, 1,917,712 visible triangles, preview at 900 px before 605 s after 65 s now chaining and visibility 33 s, projection 18 s, topology 8 s

Being worked on: chaining and the visibility split are now half the remaining time and are the next thing to be vectorised. A section of a 950,000-triangle building takes about half a minute; keeping the outside of a box, which draws the whole model minus a notch, takes about a minute and a half.

Hairline seams between adjacent fills fixed, watching

Two neighbouring shapes each traced their own coverage at one half, so along a shared boundary both retreated and left a thread of bare paper — worst where the boundary is horizontal or vertical, which is most of a building.

axis-aligned shared boundary 569 -> 4 gap pixels painted area grew 0.088%

Shapes now overlap by a fraction of a pixel where they meet each other, and not where they meet the background. A regression test holds both halves. What we do not yet have is a re-measurement on a large real scene since the fix; if you see a white thread, please say where.

Where the honest limit shows: at high Detail with Hidden Lines on, a dense model turns the interior into a thicket. It is correct — every one of those lines is really there — but it is a reason to lower Detail rather than a reason to trust it blindly.

Tones on a noisy render handled, imperfect

Denoising is deliberately off so that colours are repeatable, which costs grain. Grain banded straight is a tone broken into thousands of speckles. The luminance is blurred before banding and specks below the minimum shape size are dropped, but a very low sample count in a dark scene can still band oddly. Raise Render Samples if tones look blotchy.

Shaded Illustration is the least finished mode open

It works, and the machinery under it is measured: tones are traced from a blurred luminance so that render grain does not become a thousand speckles, evenly lit shapes are left flat rather than given an invented shadow, and the tints come from the material colour rather than the render. What has not been done is a proper look at the result on a range of real scenes, and its quality is the current piece of work. Treat it as the roughest thing here.

Transparency is ignored by design, for now

Glass, alpha blending and refraction are drawn as opaque. Preflight warns when it finds materials that look transparent and names them. Nothing shows through.

Non-manifold and coincident geometry handled

Edges shared by more than two faces are kept rather than dropped, because real production meshes have them and dropping them silently leaves holes in the drawing. Coincident surfaces resolve to the earliest face, deterministically. Negative object scale flips normals and is reported by preflight rather than corrected behind your back.

Things preflight will tell you about

No camera, nothing in shot, or a camera pointing away — these block the export rather than producing an empty file that looks like a success.
A camera inside the model's bounding box, which is normal for an interior and wrong for a product shot.
Transparent materials, broken textures, a missing world, negative scale, very dense meshes, depth of field, motion blur.

What it does not do

No dimensions, annotations or title blocks. No measurements, centrelines, hole callouts, GD&T or tolerances. It is not a drafting tool and does not claim to be.
Text becomes outlines. Text objects are exported as shapes, not as editable text with a font.
One frame. No animation, no frame ranges, no stability of identity between frames.
No gradients. Every fill is flat by design; tones are flat bands, not a gradient mesh.
No light and shadow beyond the tone bands. There is no separate Base / Shadow / Highlight decomposition to edit as layers of the same shape.
No auxiliary or detail views beyond the eight standard directions, and no automatic view selection.
A cut section fills only where the plane meets solid material. Surfaces with no thickness are cut as lines, correctly, and there is nothing to fill.
No exploded views, BOM, assembly steps or STEP import. Those are other tools' jobs and several Blender add-ons already do them well.
No hatching patterns. The cut face is a flat fill, not a hatch.
Not tested on macOS or Linux.

When something goes wrong

What you see	What it usually is
Blender looks frozen	It is drawing. Watch the progress bar in the panel; press Cancel or Escape to stop it cleanly. A cancelled export leaves no half-written file.
An empty or nearly empty drawing	The camera does not see the model, or Detail has removed everything at this resolution. Press Check Scene — it names the reason. An empty result is reported as a failure, never as a success.
Everything is one flat grey	Materials with no base colour, or Preserve Material Colours on a scene whose colour lives entirely in the lighting. Try Match Render Appearance.
Colours far darker than the render	Fixed in 1.0. If you still see it, the add-on is an older build — check the version in Preferences.
A white thread between two colour areas	The seam described above. Please report where it is, at what page size.
Preview shows nothing	No image editor was available. The panel says which image to open; open an Image Editor and choose it.
The silhouette looks inside out	Negative object scale. Preflight names the objects; apply scale.
The drawing changed after you edited an add-on setting outside the panel	Choosing a mode resets the ten settings the mode owns. The panel lists which ones.

Every export writes a JSON report beside the drawing: path and anchor counts, duplicates removed, how much ink is on the page, how many fragments fell under the threshold, and per-stage timings. If a line you expected is missing, the diagnostic can say which setting removed it.

The three add-ons

All three come from the same tree. The product table chooses the modes and controls, while the release builder derives a separate package, operator, panel and scene namespace for each. None is a worse renderer than the others; each is a shorter menu over the same one, aimed at somebody with a different job.

They can be installed together and compared in the same Blender session.

	Illustration	Drafting	Plotter
Clean Outline, SVG, layers, real holes, fitted curves	yes	yes	yes
Exact hidden-line removal	yes	yes	yes
Preview, preflight, progress and cancel, report	yes	yes	yes
Page in millimetres, per-class line styles, caching	yes	yes	yes
Illustration and Shaded Illustration modes	yes	—	—
Filled shapes and tones	yes	fills only	—
Match Render Appearance	yes	—	—
Technical mode, hidden lines	—	yes	—
Cut sections: plane, box, slab	—	yes	—
Standard views at one shared scale	—	yes	—
Depth-graded line weight	—	yes	—
Plotter mode, one pen per layer	—	—	yes
An exact drawing scale	—	yes	yes
DXF output, leaving objects out	—	yes	yes

Where a build does not carry a feature, the control is shown, disabled, with a line saying which add-on it lives in. Hiding it would leave people unable to discover what the others do; silently ignoring it would be worse.