how about using CAD Exchanger?? http://www.cadexchanger.com/
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coversion
Hi everybody,
I would like to know if someone know how I can convert a STL file into BREP or IGES or STEP. I found a software that converts everything but it is sooo expensive.
thank you.
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3 archived replies
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I don´t think that CADExchanger or a similar translation software will help you here. BREP, IGES and STEP are all file formats that represent a CAD model through exact geometry (splines, algebraic surfaces, ...) and topology, but a STL file only contains a triangle mesh.
While it is not too hard to triangulate a CAD model and therefore convert it to an STL mesh approximating the original CAD model (OCC can do that), it is hard to reconstruct a reasonable CAD model from a triangle mesh. Probably you could just write the whole triangle mesh out in STEP file but this is really not intended and most translation applications won´t allow it.
If you really want to reconstruct a CAD model from a triangle mesh (or point cloud) you will have to deal with surface reconstruction and probably specialised software packages for this task. OCC has a commercial module (SSP) that could help you get started but I think there would be quite a lot of work to do. Perhaps there are some OCC useres that could comment on this?
I don´t know if there are any other open source projects that deal with this but I would be interested to here for myself.
Best regards
Commenter-2