The main reason being STL files don’t generally exceed a few MB in file size, making them quick and easy to download. It’s also the file format of choice among hobbyists and makers for disseminating finished models, objects, and parts on community-sharing websites such as Thingiverse and MyMiniFactory. All slicers work with STL files – they’re the main file format of choice for 3D printing.

One of the main benefits of the STL file format is widespread adoption by 3D printing slicer software. The process can degrade the overall resolution of the model and lower fidelity as the tessellation is more an approximation than a replica.īut, these discrepancies are generally negligible or easily fixed for the purposes of 3D printing. The resulting file doesn’t describe texture, color, scale, or units.ĭoing so effectively transforms the model into a collection of tiny triangles that drop in size but grow in number as a model’s complexity increases but remain vastly simpler than traditional CAD-generated surfaces and, especially, curves. Unlike other CAD file formats, which feature a host of information about a specific 3D model’s complex surfacing and geometry based on curves and splines (OBJ being one popular example), STL converts surfaces to a mesh or cloud of triangular faces and vertices through a technique known as tessellation.

The idea was to create a file format as a simple and lightweight vessel for a 3D CAD model that’s easy to output to a 3D printer.

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