Thinning STL files

From: Terry T. Wohlers (twohlers@compuserve.com)
Date: Fri Feb 07 1997 - 06:51:33 EET


Albin Hastbacka wrote:

> I recently received an STL file that was 176 Megabytes long (ASCII) and
> had 626,000 facets. The physical size of this part was a cube with 2 mm
 
176MB and 626K facets! Send it back!

Seriously, consider RapidTools from DeskArtes or RPM from Imageware. If
you don't have access to one of them, try David Alciatore
(dga@engr.colostate.edu) of Colorado State University. He might do the
work for you (for a small fee). He's written decimation (polygon
reduction) software for SGI computers that's fast and works very well. I
use it regularly to reduce the size of laser digitized models. Whatever
program you run, you're going to need a computer with lots of memory.

Good luck!

Terry Wohlers
Wohlers Associates



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:39:20 EEST