Hello,

The STL functionality for Spaceclaim imports that geometry as reference, you effectively have to rebuild from scratch using that data, it's really not brought in as something to modify/use directly.

http://www.youtube.com/user/SpaceClaimCorp#p/u/5/Z5RR24RcOdw

Personally I think there are many other useful things that could be included in MoI before getting to something like this.

Hi OSTexo,

> The STL functionality for Spaceclaim imports that geometry
> as reference, you effectively have to rebuild from scratch
> using that data, it's really not brought in as something to
> modify/use directly.

Right, so the tricky thing about something like that is it's pretty easy for that nuance that it's "for reference only" to be lost on people - if someone just sees STL as a supported file type, and then try to open it and get a 3D model displayed on the screen, a lot of people then assume that they have opened up geometry to work with just like one of their other files. Then when it doesn't behave like other things they have modeled it is confusing and they wonder if something is going wrong...

Maybe if it was on some completely different dialog than the regular Open or Import dialog that would help avoid that kind of confusion.

- Michael

I recently took a beating from a guy in another forum who was sure there was a bug in a program because his 3dm file was empty when opened in the other program!!! lol I tried to explain there were differences, but he didnt want to have any of it.... :o

Hi Burr, yeah unfortunately there has been something of a trend recently where some rendering programs say that they support 3DM files, but what they actually do is only read polygon mesh data from the file and don't attempt to process the actual NURBS/Solids model data itself...

MoI on the other hand only reads and writes the NURBS objects and doesn't try to do anything with polygon mesh data in 3DM at all.

It can cause some confusion having really different kinds of data like that potentially stored within the same file format.

It's kind of more common for file formats to only contain one kind of data in them, the person you were talking to was probably used to working with file types like that.

- Michael

Yeah, actually he was a CAD/CAM guy, who received a file from someone else, and couldnt grasp that an "OpenNURBS" file could contain anything that wouldnt be read into his NURBS based Cad/CAM program (3dm is 3dm, right!)....Convinced it was a bug and proclaimed the software programmers were stupid idiots! :o

Can you imagine?? "Michael doesnt know what he is doing because MoI wont open this 3dm file, that is HIS filetype!!"

Anyway, an example of the confusion you were pointing out..