Hi everyone, I ran into a problem with the file size of my latest design. When I export an STL from Revit, the file size is approx 152mb and because it exceeds the max 64mb, it looks like I won’t be able to print it. I tried simplifying the profile of ribbons in my design and that helped a little. My next move is to see if an OBJ format results in a smaller file size. Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks, Mike
Does it get significantly smaller when you zip it ? Uploading zip files is supported, and STL is quite redundant especially in its human-readable ASCII text version. Note that there is another limit - 1 million triangles - that your current model may be exceeding as well.
Meshlab (http://www.meshlab.net/) has several good polygon reduction tools. I use "Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation" very often. I turn on the options for "Preserve Topology" and "Planar Simplification". I often start with half the number of facets of the original, but there have been times I've done _significant_ reduction such as 750,000 faces on a basically flat model down to 5000 or less. It doesn't make the edges as sharp as I'd like, but I've been very happy with the results otherwise. A huge number of the models in my shop have been hollowed out by computing the inner volume with "Uniform Mesh Resampling" and then applying the Decimation tool.
@mkroeker I tried 'zipping' multiple file types, the closest I came was 64.8mb.... @stonysmith My next attempt will be to use the Meshlab software on the smaller file sizes... Thanks for your help! ...I'll post an update if it works.
I was able to get a working model using the Meshlab application. Still playing around with the reduction tool settings to find the best results. Thanks again for the suggestions! Mike
For reference, in latest version of Meshlab the option is called "Simplification: Quadric Edge Collapse Decimation". But to be honest, regardless if you do remeshing or not, 64MB limit is extremely low and unreasonable for fine prints, even a ZIPPED STL file with Ultra compression mode can very easily exceed that size (this assuming every designer even knows of various ZIP compression modes). Considering Shapeways offers printing/casting in many expensive materials, even gold, they should prove they are serious about this and not have such a tiny file size limit and increase it to 128MB at least. It's 2024 now, they can handle it and their competitors already do.