Hi Danny,

> I'm wondering if STEP would be the right direction to include
> in the next set of translators for MoI, <....>

Well, it's pretty much a no-brainer in this particular case, because it happened to be very easy for me to add it.

The STEP library is a companion to the IGES library that I was already using from HarmonyWare, it used the same kind of interface method so it was about as close as possible to just dropping in a new feature without doing much work on my part. That doesn't happen very often! :)

The only reason I did not use it for v1 was purely to reduce my initial business start-up costs.

I needed to add SAT export to enable export from MoI into Revit for use by architects, so I thought this would be a good time to also add STEP into the mix since it did not take much extra effort from me to do it.


I certainly agree that STEP did not live up to its initial marketing as being a complete solution to interop and a total replacement for IGES - any hugely complex specification is not going to solve interop, it just leaves too many variables when you let a whole bunch of different people write code to try and work with that huge written standard. The only real way to make things better is to have a common body of code that can be freely used so that it isn't up to a whole bunch of different implementers to all write their own complex code. But STEP did not do that.

At any rate, it can certainly be useful - many STEP translators are pretty refined at this point and typically support transferring solids instead of just surfaces. Although IGES can support solids it is often not supported so typically IGES will be surface data only and require stitching back into solids.

It's just another option that might come in handy for NURBS data transfer, that's the way I look at it.

I'm not making any kind of political statement that STEP is the "way of the future" or anything like that by including it.


> Which STEP standard are you looking at is it STEP 203 ?

Yeah, it's variant 203: Configuration controlled 3D designs of mechanical parts and assemblies.

- Michael