3D Printer File Formats Explained

Is there a way to take an svg file and extrude it, so that the highest plane is not flat, but has dimension, itself. For example, importing a leaf pattern where leaves themselves are slightly domed from a side view. The final application would be for mold making and clay rolling, where a softer 3 dimensional finished shape is desired.

What impact does file formats have on slicing and thus printing?

thank you sir!

Thanks a lot

if you want to figure out why your print failed (outside of hardware/material issues) you have to know how to read the files, so thanks!

Great video! You explain things well and that helps it to stick better. I can find a download for Boxy on Windows. I tried the Boxy website and the Windows app store. Did they remove it?

Excellent video

Hi Herb et all. Have you tried cadquery? It's supposed to be like openscad. It uses python and can import step files. It's is supposed to build stl, step and amf faster then openscad. Would love to hear anyone's experience with it.

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Thank you, Sir. You just give me one week lesson in just not even a day, and I understand all of the stuffs ur saying.

I just noticed that .the 3MF files start with a "PK" (Phil Katz PK zIp ) if you rename them to a .Zip file they will Unzip into several folders and files. Another reason they are small. Mine have XML records of Vertex and Triangles.

Wow beautiful explanation as always. You sure gave a great style. I investigated STL and 3MF a few months ago. I looked if I could write a c# desktop app to design screws nut and misc fasteners. I found the stl triangle geometry was a head trip. Just cutting a circle out of a square produces complex STL files. I have viewed them in ascii text!!

The slicer is pure magic on how triangles get sliced so neatly too. Thank for a peek in side the magic geometry. Good work.

you are so close to camera. this is uncomfortable.

I don't know about others, but I absolutely refuse to entertain the concept of subscription software. You can easily end up paying for it even when you're dead.

Hey Dr. Vax. Sometime ago, you spoke of an application to turn 2d texts into 3d .stl files. I can't remember what it was called, only that it required Windows 10 to use. Can help clear up my foggy memory?

Nice summary, thanks for making this video. I teach a 3D printing class at my hackerspace and I'll be sharing this video with students.

I would suggest that STL files are more like a vector format than a raster format, however. The dots in a bitmap file are 1-dimentional points represented in a 2-dimentional array.

The facets (triangles) in a STL file are not 1-dimentional - they have a size and shape defined by the 3-dimentional location of three vertices (which themselves are 1-dimentional, but not stored in a 3-dimentional array). This is closer to the way a vector file format works describing a shape - only in this case, all the shapes are triangles.

This was a great cross platform tutorial. I managed a ProE program at a major truck builder for 7 years after using 3d modeling for 6 years. I am coming back after procuring a 3d printer and a go fund me 4 axis mill. I have never seen a clearer explanation of the formats from the positive additive/subtractive, to the subtractive to the additive (for a 3d printer versus a CNC). Many thanks and I subscribed after your first video, this one, I watched. Thank you!

great video as always 👍😃

Very interesting. I had been treating STL as a black box, and didn't really care about how it works on the inside. Smaller files are nice, but it's not clear to me that it buys me much. A few MB is just not that much storage in these days of terabyte drives. That said, it would be interesting to know how they achieved that compression; perhaps they exploit some similarity to neighboring triangles. I'll bet there's a wikipedia article on it :D

Thanks for the tour of common formats and cool things you can do with 2D images!