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Evaluate Solid

In one sentence: Check whether a mesh is a closed, manifold solid — a requirement for watertight 3-D printing and valid Boolean operations.

Overview

Workbench: Mesh
Menu: Mesh → Meshes → Analyze → Check Solid
Command: Mesh_EvaluateSolid
Shortcut: none

Checks whether the selected mesh is a closed, manifold solid. Reports "Solid" if all edges are shared by exactly two triangles, or "Not solid" if any open boundaries exist.

Intuition

For a mesh to be 3-D printable and for Boolean operations to work correctly, it must be "watertight" — no holes, every edge shared by exactly two triangles. Evaluate Solid is a quick yes/no check for this property.

Use it as a fast sanity check before attempting mesh Booleans or before exporting for printing. For a full defect analysis, use Evaluate and Repair.

When to use it

  • Quick check before attempting mesh Boolean operations (Union, Difference).
  • Confirming a repaired mesh is now watertight.
  • Verifying that a tessellated solid (From Part Shape) produced a closed mesh.

Step-by-step

  1. Select the mesh in the model tree.
  2. Choose Mesh → Meshes → Analyze → Check Solid.
  3. A dialog reports either Solid (closed, manifold) or Not solid (open boundaries exist).

Common mistakes and pitfalls

Solid check does not detect self-intersections

A mesh can pass the solid check (closed, manifold) while still having self-intersections that will cause slicer errors. Always run the full Evaluate and Repair for a complete check.

'Not solid' means there are holes

Use Evaluate and Repair or Fill Up Holes to locate and fix the open boundaries.

See also