stl to solid

[odessa]

Good Morning.

 

Is there any program which can convert stl to solid?

[MikronGuy]

RHINO will do it for you. i have done it a couple times to show customers the machining process of their parts

[Colin Gilchrist]

Yes, there are programs out there that will do a conversion. The big question is why do you want to do the conversion? STL files have no curved surfaces. They are a triangulated mesh of faces. What do you want to do with the converted Solid? You won't be able to get any "edge curves" from the converted solid, as the result will just be a bunch of little triangular faces.

 

If you are trying to use it for a toolpath, you can use the STL directly as a Mesh Entity.

[gcode]

Spaceclaim does a pretty good job, but solids made from Verify sessions

can be so big they are not useful

[EX-wccprogrammer]

There are several softwares that will convert to solid. Geo Magic, Rapidform, and SpaceClaim are a few. A literal conversion will be faceted as mentioned above, so software selection will depend on what the intended purpose of the solid is. I do literal conversion quite often as I use the solids for comparison in Vericut and it does not matter if the solid is faceted.

 

If you need something more presentable, I would recommend a software that allows the STL to be used as a 'guideline' for construction of a clean solid. SpaceClaim is the only one that I am aware of that does this.

[Colin Gilchrist]

Rapidform will also let you select a portion of a mesh and "auto-surface" it. It has some specific tools for creating water tight solids from mesh data. (doesn't matter if it is points or triangles.) Rapidform is also $25-30k last time I was involved with using it.

[EX-wccprogrammer]

I have found that each software has things that it does very well, and some things that it does poorly. There is no ideal software, so choose the best for for your application. Or, just buy them all!

[Colin Gilchrist]

I have found that each software has things that it does very well, and some things that it does poorly. There is no ideal software, so choose the best for for your application. Or, just buy them all!

 

Well said.

 

If you deal with STL files on a regular basis, I highly recommend Magics RP for working with the STL files. You can do some amazing things for healing/fixing problems, and re-meshing the model to reduce the STL file size. This makes a huge difference when loading the models in Verify.

[Verisurf - Ernie Husted]

Verisurf Reverse can create Surfaces from point clouds or STL meshes.