Is there any way to work with an imported stl precisely?

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1

I imported an stl (because it’s the only file I have) but I can’t select faces, I can’t sketch on it precisely because nothing will snap to it, I can’t even move it precisely. Even the move tool anchor point thing won’t snap to the corner, it’s just floating randomly in space. I get that it’s an stl and it doesn’t have the sketches and all that, but it’s basically a cube (on one side), it still has very well defined dimensions, corners, faces, and edges, why can’t I interact with any of them? All I can do is just blindly drag it around arbitrarily, or sketch “on” it without kind of precision. Do I have to do something to it first? Like convert it or something?

2

Might be wrong but the way I understood Shapr uses Parasolid geometric modeling kernel. People at Shapr just uses/licenese that model kernel to develop their own UI to work with iPad and Desktop. Wikipedia has a list of Parasolid kernel using apps like Shapr, Onshore, Rhino, Solid Edge, Solid Works, etc. What you’re looking for can’t be done in these apps as well as far as I know.

So if STL editable feature is not in Parasolid, Shapr can’t add that feature.

But you will be able to edit it in Mesh Modeling tools like Blender.

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3

I’m not trying to edit the stl, I just want to align it at zero and see the exact dimensions, maybe stretch the whole thing to a specific length, you’re telling me that’s impossible?

4

You can resize either uniformly or non-uniformly, but it’s a multiplier. You can’t set a specific size directly by value.

5

What your looking to do within Shapr is impossible with STL imports. But there are workarounds you can try.

If you open the STL in Blender you will be able to do what you want, align, get dimension info and such. But using Blender is another challenge.

You can convert the STL to STEP and open it Shapr3d so you can edit it and get the info you want. Here is a tutorial of the conversion with Freecad.

  1. Create shape from mesh
  2. Convert to solid and export it as STEP file
  3. Import it in Shapr and you will get the editing features back since now the model is solid.
6

Import into Fusion free version, convert mesh object, export as Step, import into Shapr. Delete millions of unnecessary faces.
Shapr should however be able to do the conversion itself in my opinion as such a sophisticated software.