Caligari trueSpace can import STL and it can save to a wide range of formats.
However, it hasn't had any official support since Microsoft bought Caligari to position trueSpace as a competitor to Google's Sketchup. (I call it Messup because I've seen some of the worst geometry ever made by people using Sketchup.) Google had Sketchup for people to use to populate Google Earth with 3D models of buildings. Microsoft whipped up Virtual Earth... and nobody cared. People weren't stepping up to voluntarily use the free version of Sketchup to make 3D stuff for Google Earth either. Microsoft quickly swept trueSpace under the digital rug, left the site for it unchanged for a while until they got around to deleting it. Lots of people grabbed the free downloads and some patches and other things have been made. There's a ton of tSx plugins available for free, including many formerly commercial ones. Most tSx for version 6.x and some for 5.x will work but most for older versions won't. One glitch that nobody has fixed yet is when importing some 3D file formats it scales the mesh down to make the largest axis, X, Y, or Z, exactly 8 units of whichever is the currently selected unit in the workspace. With STL I load up the model in a slicer to get the proper XYZ sizes then scale up to match in trueSpace then save a copy in its native COB format. I always save in COB (frequently! it appends an auto-incremented number to the file names) and export to STL. Exports of the formats it supports are fine. It's just importing it has the size issue with. Would have been so nice if Microsoft hadn't killed it by buying the company. I've used every trueSpace version since 2.2a so I'm used to its oddities it inherited by originally being an Amiga program. If you want to give it a whirl there are a few versions of 7.x here http://truespace3d.free.fr/index.php/truespace-7-6/ I use 6.6 since the Model Side of 7.x is essentially version 6.6 and I never could get into the new 7.x Workspace. It's so different from 2.x through 6.6. Hmmm, I don't remember if Workspace side has the size issue with importing. On Tuesday, July 4, 2023 at 03:10:58 AM MDT, gene heskett <ghesk...@shentel.net> wrote: On 7/4/23 02:01, andrew beck wrote: > I run a CNC machine shop full time. > > We always want the step files. Or SOLIDWORKS files etc. > > And we make it own gcode from that. > > It would be a nightmare to run someone else's gcode lol. > I'll have to agree Andrew. Most of the stuff on thingiverse for 3d printers is in .stl formats, cura can usually make something useful out of them. but its maddening to see an .stl that needs fixed, and I've not found anything that can convert an .stl back into something that can be edited in openscad. So I wind up about 95% of the time, using the image as a guide to compose something that looks like it well enough to work. _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
