Thanks for the explanations. I understand the problem but for those of use that just do this for a hobby and the cash flow is always on the negative side, justifying a the money it takes to buy some of the software packages that it takes to do this kind of thing is pretty hard to justify. If there is a way to do these things on some type of limited basis like using TC and importing the IGES file, that will have to work for now. It takes a while to import the stl and it takes a while each time you do something with it. I can live with that for now and hope that someone will come along with the neet little free converter that has a fix it button.

Now for a real question. Is there an limit on the size of the stl file or # of facets in the stl file that can be imported or is simply a matter of the bigger it gets, the slower thinigs happen.

Also, a request. It would be nice if you would use more progress bars. For these operations, that take some time like import and export, I've sat more than once wondering if I should kill the program because it hit a dead end. To your credit, it always comes back when the operation is complete. A visual that things are still running is always helpful.

Thanks

Hi bmabam,

> Now for a real question. Is there an limit on the size of the stl
> file or # of facets in the stl file that can be imported or is
> simply a matter of the bigger it gets, the slower thinigs happen.

There isn't any one specific limit, it's more of the second thing you mention there where if you have a whole lot of polygons it will become heavier and heavier in data size and get slower.

I'd think you'd want to stick with something around 2000 faces or so.

It's just a not a good method to use though for heavier meshes, objects structured like that are just a very bad fit with the way NURBS work.


> Also, a request. It would be nice if you would use more progress
> bars. For these operations, that take some time like import and
> export, I've sat more than once wondering if I should kill the
> program because it hit a dead end.

Yup, in v3 I'm planning on working on this for importing.

For v2 there was a big step forward for export, there is a progress bar shown during the mesh generation stage now when exporting to a mesh file format.

- Michael