STEPToMesh

The program STEPToMesh converts solids contained in STEP files into triangle meshes.

Description

The program STEPToMesh is a command line utility to convert solids contained in STEP files into triangle meshes. The supported triangles formats are ASCII STL and binary STL. STEPToMesh is based on OpenCASCADE (https://www.opencascade.com). The program uses cxxops (https://github.com/jarro2783/cxxopts) for parsing the command line.

Requirements

• CMake installation (https://cmake.org)
• Visual Studio C++ installation (https://visualstudio.microsoft.com)
• OpenCASCADE installation (https://old.opencascade.com/content/latest-release, download needs registration)

Usage

Listing the contents (solids) of a STEP file: STEPToMesh -c -i <step file>

Converting the overall file content (solids) into a mesh:

STEPToMesh -i <step file> -o <output file> -l <linear deflection> -a <angular deflection>

The parameters <linear deflection> and <angular deflection> control the resolution of the triangulation as described in https://dev.opencascade.org/doc/overview/html/occt_user_guides__mesh.html#occt_modalg_11_2.

Converting selected solids of the file into a mesh:

STEPToMesh -i <step file> -o <output file> -l <linear deflection> -a <angular deflection> -s <solid1>,<solid2>,<...>

In order to change the default output format binary STL to ASCII STL the command line argument -f stl_asciihas to be specified.

Following the help text from the command line:

STEPToMesh -h
STEP to triangle mesh conversion
Usage:
  STEPToMesh [OPTION...]

  -i, --in arg       Input file
  -o, --out arg      Output file
  -f, --format arg   Output file format (stl_bin or stl_ascii) (default:
                     stl_bin)
  -c, --content      List content (solids)
  -s, --select arg   Select solids by name or index (comma seperated list, index starts with 1)
  -l, --linear arg   Linear deflection
  -a, --angular arg  Angular deflection (degrees)
  -h, --help         Print usage

Examples

• See examples directory

Remarks

This code has been tested with an OpenCASCADE 7.5.0 prebuilt binary (opencascade-7.5.0-vc14-64.exe) on Windows, as well as OpenCASCADE system packages on openSUSE Linux. With changes in the configuration section in the CMakeLists.txt file the build should also work with other OpenCASCADE versions.