MACHINE RESEARCH HANDLES ANY STL FILE ON ANY DEVICE SEAMLESSLY
Open and view STL files on the fly—even on your mobile device
Start discovering how easy managing STL files really can be by signing up for a free 14 day trial of Machine Research products and get access to our great stl file viewer instantly, as well as powerful, highly secure, cloud-based services that deliver functionality for, quoting and accessing and re-using knowledge to speed quoting and programming workflows. We also plan to offer ITAR compliant services for customers that are required to adhere to ITAR regulations. Pay for the functionality you need as a manufacturer, not for expensive tools you don’t.
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Machine Research & STL​
Since .stl is the de facto file format related to any additive manufacturing technology Machine Research understands that manufacturers have the need to read, view and analyze STL files without difficulty. Also, customers that don’t own a full seat of a professional CAD system still need to view and edit .stl files. To solve these problems, Machine Research has developed tools that let our customers read, view and manipulate .stl files without a CAD/CAM platform license. We support STL files in ASCII and Binary format. Due to the lack of material and scale properties in a .stl file it’s pragmatic to provide relevant part file in a native CAD format or another common file format (X_T, IGES, DXF, ACIS, DWG, SAT and more) Fortunately, Machine Research provides viewers and tools to manage all these different file formats to assess the STL file in context.
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STL - Some Background
STL is a file format that was developed by 3D Systems to support their additive manufactuirng process, Sterolithography (file extension is .stl). The acronym STL stands for ‘Standard Tessellation Language’ The .stl file format has become the de facto standard for additive manufacturing technology and virtually every CAD/CAM system today can output a .stl file. The STL file format is fairly simplistic compared to other translation formats since it generally only describes the surfaces of a 3D model, represented as a mesh of triangles (tessellated). The ‘mesh tolerance’ is usually a parameter set upon outputting a .stl file and the finer the mesh the more accurate end product. There are no material or scale properties conveyed in a .stl file, so in order to determine mass, surface area etc. another representation of the model is required in a format that contain these properties. Given the limited information in a .stl file it cannot be written back to the source format or any other file format, so it’s a one-way translation only.
