Hi Bob,
> you mentioned that 3DS and STL are only triangle based. Does
> this mean that there are better formats for saving nurbs models?
Well, it can depend on what you are doing with them.
If you're using them for calculating toolpaths, then probably it is fine to just have triangles instead of quads or n-gons.
3DS is a really much older format though and has some 16-bit era limitations in things like the number of points that can be inside of a single mesh object. So I would say to generally avoid that particular format if at all possible.
> Would OBJ or LWO formats bet better?
For rendering you would normally want to focus on these formats intead of STL for a couple of other reasons too, like these formats also support materials in them so your style assignments in MoI will come through as material assignments in the OBJ or LWO file.
But if you are calculating toolpaths off of the mesh data rather than rendering it, that won't really make a difference.
Some programs can actually have problems dealing with polygons with more than 3 or 4 sides in them as well, so it's not necessarily an automatically better thing to use if your program does not like to deal with that kind of data.
Every program can be a little bit different in what kind of data it expects to work off of and what it has been tested with, so there isn't necessarily just one format that is always better to use in every single circumstance. Some programs are better at handling one kind of file format than another.
STL is probably the safest bet for CAM and toolpath calculation type use. STL has a very simple file structure which tends to make for less potential problems in interpreting the data.
- Michael
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