I like step files, but I can never find them, well, almost never. is there a secret to it? I do not like to try to remix stl files. STLs take forever to render in my Freecad/Trailing edge of technology setup. steps are just fine. for stls, my workflow is import, create shape from mesh stitch 0.01, and I’ve been waiting a while to share the details of creating the solid and it is still working on it. This is a trailing edge cad station, Precision 5820? nvidia Quadro P4000. It should blaze as it has twice the HP as my SOLID WS @ HP, pun intended.
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Most cad software isn’t STL friendly. I’m not sure why. Solidworks gets angry if it has more than 50k faces. Inventor will import them as meshes most of the time unless you get an add-on and even then it’s not great. Fusion and Onshape aren’t much better in my experience. I’m not familiar with FreeCad, so I can’t say how it handles.
As for step files, they are too easily modified. Most designers don’t want to hand over all their work in an easily manipulated file format that someone else might just re-post as their own work.
If you need to repair a mesh, there are other tools out there. I still use an old version of Netfabb Basic (v7.4?). I think you can find it only on github now, but it will let you know if something is manifold or not. A lot of slicers will repair stls now too. Even if it’s a viable mesh, there’s no guarantee the cad software will like it.
Do you ever use stl to step file converters?
Kind of a foreign concept to me as step files have information the stl files do not. As to being to easy to remix? Is’nt that the whole point behind open source?
Honestly, I’m with you here a while back I asked about this very thing on Bluesky, and I had a few people say they’d never even heard of them.
Ever since BambuStudio told me I could use STEP files for higher resolution (which I don’t think is necessarily inherently true; it’s just that you can choose to render them when you import them into BambuStudio with higher resolution than what you normally would with most CAD softwares’ default export settings), I’ve slowly stopped uploading STLs in favor of just using STEPs.
Across thousands of downloads, I’ve had maybe like three people comment about lack of STLs, and all of them just didn’t know their slicing software of choice could indeed handle STEPs–presumably because people either already know they can use STEPs, use the 3mfs I upload and therefore don’t even notice, or just try to load the STEPs into their slicing software and find it works.
Another benefit of STEPs I’ve found (which I’m not sure if STLs can replicate or not) is that at least with Fusion and Bambu Studio, the Component tree of Fusion is saved in the STEP and is read by Bambu Studio, which allows you to name all of the bodies of a multi-part model (convenient when you have a complicated model, like my Pokemon coins, that have lots of parts with different colors that, when named, can easily be identified and assigned the appropriate color), and also allows the “Split to Objects” feature to separate each Component while keeping any various bodies within that component together (Handy for my Royal Broadsword, which has multiple parts that are multicolor but need to stay together. You can load in a single file, Split it to Objects, find the multicolor parts, then Split to Parts on those to separate them out and reassign the colors as you need).
I don’t think this is necessarily the case for most people, though, since STLs can also just be reuploaded. I’m also pretty sure I’ve seen remixable models only with STLs as well, which I assume is just because there’s a culture/history of using STLs in the 3D printing community.
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I suspect the reason is historical. Until recently (a couple of years) widely used slicers, like Cura, wouldn’t chew anything but STL (at least for CAD exporting).
So people just got used to share the STLs.
I do agree that STEP is a much better file format for technical parts. I add STEPs to all my designs and not always the respective STL.
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That part still makes sense (to me)
For a ‘finished product’ or ‘deliverable’ an STL makes sense in the same way that a PDF makes sense for a finished document not intended to be edited.
We are already downloading zip files, it seems to me that the zip should include both an stl and an easier to edit/remix file format.
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