{"id":12,"date":"2016-11-02T17:47:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T17:47:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2021-05-23T17:00:28","modified_gmt":"2021-05-23T16:00:28","slug":"converting-3mf-files-to-stl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/3dprinters\/2016\/11\/converting-3mf-files-to-stl.html","title":{"rendered":"Converting 3MF Files to STL"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I create new items in Google Sketchup<\/a>, they sometimes have holes in them when I export them as STereoLitography or STL<\/a> files, as such I usually make use of the Microsoft<\/a> repair service on Azure<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This allows you to upload an STL<\/a> file, the site will repair the holes and then allow you to download a repaired STL<\/a> file of your model.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Microsoft<\/a> being Microsoft<\/a>, along with a bunch of other big companies decided they wanted to use a file format that had Digital Rights Management DRM<\/a> encoded into them and so the 3MF<\/a> file format was born.<\/p>\n

At some time in the recent past, Microsoft<\/a> updated their repair service so it now only exports 3MF<\/a> files – great – let’s stuff the free community!<\/p>\n

Repetier<\/a> Host, Slic3r<\/a>, etc do not support the 3MF<\/a> format, although Cura<\/a> does, but only because the people that write it – Ultimaker<\/a> are part of the 3MF Consortium<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Windows 8 and 10 users can use the Microsoft<\/a> App 3D Builder<\/a> to convert their 3MF<\/a> files back to STL<\/a> format, however I don’t have any Windows machines and only use a Mac, so I need to look a bit further afield.<\/p>\n

So I go looking for a potential solution, and find one on released on GitHub<\/a> by Charles Shapiro called 3mf2stl<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is intended as a Linux solution to the problem, but I see no reason why it should not also work on a Mac as this is also Unix based.<\/p>\n

I download the source code, extract it and type ‘make’ in the top level directory (OK, so it only has a top level).<\/p>\n

First stumbling block is that it requires libzip – no problem, that is available via the App store<\/a> and is a pretty simple command line install.<\/p>\n

Second stumbling block, libzip won’t actually install because my version of Xcode<\/a> is out of date and I need to update to 8.1.<\/p>\n

Third stumbling block, after waiting the best part of an hour for Xcode<\/a> to upgrade itself, libzip will now install, however the make file is still not finding zip.h from \/usr\/local\/include.<\/p>\n

This requires re-installing the Xcode<\/a> command line utilities by running ‘xcode-select –install’ at the command line.<\/p>\n

Fourth stumbling block, now make can find zip.h, however it now barfs about zipconf.h, which is not actually held in \/usr\/local\/include.<\/p>\n

This is fixed by creating a link to its real location – ‘cd \/usr\/local\/include; ln -s ..\/Cellar\/libzip\/1.1.2\/lib\/libzip\/include\/zipconf.h’<\/p>\n

This time make runs through cleanly and produces an executable – 3mf2stl, which I then copy to \/usr\/local\/bin.<\/p>\n

Now I can convert my 3MF<\/a> files to STL<\/a> by running: 3mf2stl -i <input file> -o <output file><\/p>\n

Since writing the above I have now found another free service for repairing STL files and that is at Netfabb<\/a>, this is part of Autodesk and requires an account, but is free to register for one and free to use.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I create new items in Google Sketchup, they sometimes have holes in them when I export them as STereoLitography or STL files, as such I usually make use of the Microsoft repair service on Azure. This allows you to upload an STL file, the site will repair the holes and then allow you to download a repaired STL file of your…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/3dprinters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/3dprinters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/3dprinters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/3dprinters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/3dprinters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/3dprinters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/3dprinters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/3dprinters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/3dprinters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.hslracing.com\/3dprinters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}