On 7/4/23 08:03, Gregg Eshelman via Emc-users wrote:
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.
Messup is the correct name.
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.
Where it showed promises not fully delivered. Probably like Bill Hawes
who wrote ARexx on promises from commode door, and never rx'd a dime for
his efforts. That had hooks into every crack and cranny of the OS
itself, stuff you could not do in SAS/C by any means. It, amigaos, did
not have a cron type function, so Jim Himes and I wrote and published
ezcron and then ezhome, an x10 utility that used ezcron to know when to
turn on the lights etc. I even bought a copy of Rexx-plus, a compiler
written by a fomoco employee.
The first TV stations web page in the country was delivered in text mode
by an arexx script that was gradually converted to early php. Written by
Jim and I. To put that in its proper time frame, Windoze3.1 had just
been announced. We originally used the teleprompter scripts for news text.
Now I'm 21 years retired from the Chiefs chair at WDTV, Jim is head of
the linux stuff at a major guvment agency and the web page's composition
has been farmed out. 1% news, 99% commercials. Try and find the news. :(>
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.
I'll look at it, thank you for the link.
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
Cheers, Gene Heskett.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/>
_______________________________________________
Emc-users mailing list
Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
