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STL File Viewing

github.com

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Re: STL File Viewing

#51

Post by nickpinkston »

kanzure wrote: post #42
nickpinkston wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL you talk about such features as if they're simple add-ons! Each is a huuuuge commitment from dev to maintenance. But yea, it'd be nice. GrabCAD is about as close to this as you get as far as implementing solid CAD stuff.

> LOL you talk about such features as if they're simple add-ons! Each is a huuuuge commitment from dev to maintenance. Nick, you and I have met, we've talked about this before. I'm really surprised that you think that I think they are simple add-ons. We've talked for hours about these things, how the heck could you get that impression from me!

Yea, I know Sir Bishop, so don't get offended. It just seems your post made it seem easy. This would be a massive change in direction for GitHub; it's massive technical complexity when they probably don't feel they fully know what's going on with 3D / CAD. We'll get there.

Re: STL File Viewing

#52

Post by nickpinkston »

kanzure wrote: post #45
nmz787 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like the smart thing would be pushing rendering to the client. This is already done in real-time for coarse and simple models like PDB.

> smart thing would be pushing rendering to the client They seem to be doing precisely that: "This viewer is powered by Three.js and uses WebGL when available, but will fall back to the slower canvas renderer."

Yea, but good luck having a browser-based B-Rep kernel or some such. Seems like GrabCAD, etc. are doing back-end processing -> polygons in the browser using three.js, etc.

Re: STL File Viewing

#53

Post by nickpinkston »

LukeShu wrote: post #20
shurcooL wrote: post #19

I remember a few years ago Collada was quite the popular 3D file format. What are the latest trends in that field now?

Different fields. Collada was for 3D graphics (and I don't know what's going on in that field). STL is for manufacturing. STL has long been popular for commercial FDMs and CNC machines, and it is also what hobbyists use for their FDMs ("3D printers").

It's not used for most CNC machines - you want a solid CAD model like STEP/IGES for this.

Re: STL File Viewing

#54

Post by nickpinkston »

thedaniel wrote: post #37
nickpinkston wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL you talk about such features as if they're simple add-ons! Each is a huuuuge commitment from dev to maintenance. But yea, it'd be nice. GrabCAD is about as close to this as you get as far as implementing solid CAD stuff.

The maintenance commitment cannot be understated. If you add some kind of processing to a file format, people are going to expect it to always be there, and always work, so you're taking on an eternal renderer maintenance workload. That said, we'd love to cleverly render all sorts of formats. The limitation is the time and developer energy to do it right and keep it updated.

Totally - especially because these are hard to maintain if they go wild I assume.

Re: STL File Viewing

#55

Post by kanzure »

nickpinkston wrote: post #52
kanzure wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> smart thing would be pushing rendering to the client They seem to be doing precisely that: "This viewer is powered by Three.js and uses WebGL when available, but will fall back to the slower canvas renderer."

Yea, but good luck having a browser-based B-Rep kernel or some such. Seems like GrabCAD, etc. are doing back-end processing -> polygons in the browser using three.js, etc.

Shapesmith is also doing backend nurbs (OpenCASCADE + erlang server) with front-end rendering.

I think it would be possible to implement nurbs (or brep) in javascript, once there's an open source (and maintainable/legible) library that actually does nurbs intersection.

OpenNURBS doesn't count because Rhino has kept all the interesting bits to themselves. BRLCAD has had people from GSoC implement some of the remaining closed-source parts of the OpenNURBS library, so maybe they have had some recent progress on this front?

OpenCASCADE doesn't count because trying to extract just what you need is like trying to rewrite the multiple decades of software piled up in there..

Edit: Nick, didn't we have this exact conversation before in some HN comments like two years ago? I feel like we did and I feel bad for not remembering the url. Maybe this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3320172

Re: STL File Viewing

#56

Post by in_deep_thought »

wow. I built a STL file viewer and showed it to hacker news a few days ago and got absolutely no response. (www.supercuber.com). It was a different account though. I realize that this is quite a bit different than supercuber but its amazing how different the traffic to two similar links can be.

Re: STL File Viewing

#57

Post by lcrs »

LukeShu wrote: post #20
shurcooL wrote: post #19

I remember a few years ago Collada was quite the popular 3D file format. What are the latest trends in that field now?

Different fields. Collada was for 3D graphics (and I don't know what's going on in that field). STL is for manufacturing. STL has long been popular for commercial FDMs and CNC machines, and it is also what hobbyists use for their FDMs ("3D printers").

The new hot kids of 3D graphics formats are http://alembic.io and http://openvdb.org.

Finally people are moving forward from the twenty-year-old OBJ and the horrorshow that is FBX...

Re: STL File Viewing

#60

Post by shurcooL »

cfrs wrote: post #36
shurcooL wrote: post #19

I remember a few years ago Collada was quite the popular 3D file format. What are the latest trends in that field now?

GL Transmission Format: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/blob/master/specificati... http://www.perey.com/ARStandards/Khronos_8th_AR_Standards_gl...

That's neat, thanks for sharing. :)
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