CADspan SKP to STL converter

Hi All

Just thought I would say hello, introduce myself and post a topic which may be of interest to the reprap community. I'm a longtime lurker on the forum and am in the process of building a repstrap. I'll post more on that when it is a bit further along.

There is a new freebie Google Sketchup to STL file converter plugin from CADSpan might be of interest to the readers here. I did a search and it does not seem to have been mentioned yet on this forum or the blogs. I have not tried the plugin yet (I am not at the stage where anything can be printed).

EDIT: Just had a play with the plugin and it seems you have to upload your models to the CADspan server to convert the sketchup file to stl. The conversion takes quite a bit of time - even for a simple cube. The conversion is free but if things get busy I can see the free service taking second place to the "pro" subscribers. Still, it may be useful in the short term.

Makezine has a nice write up here
[forums.makezine.com]

and the tool can be downloaded here.
[www.cadspan.com]

Kind regards
Cynic

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/25/2008 01:32PM by Cynic.

Cynic,
Thanks for posting about our plugin. I hope it proves useful to the RepRap community. Currently free jobs run on the same priority as pro jobs, but you are right, we may one day have to limit free jobs or make them run on spare cores when paid jobs are running. The surfacing takes some time and then the decimation takes more time. We are working on trying to reduce both of these processing times however, I recommend that you set your resolution fairly low if you are unsure if you have big gaps, this way you will get a faster result and can "plug" a large hole if you need to.

We are very dedicated to trying to make the CADspan solution as open and useful as possible. We can't do a full open source model I think but we are very willing to look at ways to participate with research and development communities to the best of our abilities. We would love to work with others who have ideas for mesh geometry processing algorithms that need a framework.

Best wishes.

Charles Overy

Hi Charles

Good of you to post to let us know your contact details and to let us know you are interested in suggestions.

Looking back on my original post

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www.OfItselfSo.com

Hello RepRappers

Just a note that we took Cynic's feedback and we have recompiled and tweaked the service so that the resurfacing is now a litte over 10x faster. Most files get done in under 10 minutes. A simple cube now takes about 1 minute.

Please do have a look at the documentation and see the difference between resurfacing a complex file and just dumping the Sketchup geometry in the stl format. For simple shapes where the geometry is already watertight, there is indeed no need to resurface. The resurfacer is a powerful algorithm that essentially takes a virtual 3d scan of the geometry and then creates new geometry from that scan. This is also called "shrinkwrapping". It is particularly useful with game characters, architecture, industrial design, assemblies and other complex geometry that was not drawn from the "get go" with the intent to 3d print.

Thanks
Charles

I've been using it for some simple models:
[www.thingiverse.com]

This plugin really makes CAD design accessible for 3D printing. In my opinion it's the missing link in Rapid Prototyping, design has never been so accessible for non-engineers.

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Regards,

Erik de Bruijn
[Ultimaker.com] - [blog.erikdebruijn.nl]

thanx