8 ms·

STL File Viewing

153 points by bencevans 14y ago

skurmedel 14y ago
Why STL? I'd wager OBJ is a much more common interchange format for 3D models.
- LukeShu 14y ago
  OBJ is for 3D graphics, STL is for 3D manufacturing.
  - nickpinkston 14y ago
    Though it's trial to convert between them sans color loss from OBJ to STL 1.0
  - skurmedel 14y ago
    Wasn't really my point.
    - LukeShu 14y ago
      Well, github is targeting users of 3D printers, not game/graphics developers.
- jbarnette 14y ago
  We grabbed a 3D printer for the office a while ago.
hcarvalhoalves 14y ago
Cool, it works pretty well. Next step: support Wavefront's .OBJ files.
- LukeShu 14y ago
  Implementations would no doubt be similar, but here they are targeting hardware/manufacturing, not gaming/graphics.
  - jonemo 14y ago
    You wrote this comment in multiple places, but it's wrong. All 3D printing services I am aware of accept OBJ. Many printer softwares accept it. In fact, as soon as you want to print in color, you have to move away from STL and OBJ would be a good choice.
s3th 14y ago
Github amazes me all the time with the sheer number of features they ship over a given time period. Major props! The STL rendering is an awesome feature.
- TheLegace 14y ago
  It would be great if they could setup something like this in github: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNGUJjV1zQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNGUJjV1zQ This model is a combination of stl or dae files, created with a script file that puts the coordinates of the individual stl files. I'm waiting for the day that maybe github could host full simulations and we test them out in the browser. (Now that would be cool).
elisee 14y ago
Getting the following error when loading an STL file on GitHub: Invalid 'X-Frame-Options' header encountered when loading 'https://render.github.com/view/3d/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.github.com%2FEmmanuelG%2FFoldaRap2%2Fmaster%2Fstl%2Flower-corners.stl': 'ALLOW-FROM: https://github.com/' is not a recognized directive. The header will be ignored. (from https://github.com/EmmanuelG/FoldaRap2/blob/master/stl/lower-corners.stl https://github.com/EmmanuelG/FoldaRap2/blob/master/stl/lower...) Running Chrome stable. Looks like a malformed cross-origin directive? EDIT: The error is still here but it works from time to time. Some of the time I get a "Something went wrong? Reload" message, the rest of the time, the 3D model actually appears.
- sshirokov 14y ago
  Chrome doesn't have support for the `ALLOW-FROM` `X-Frame-Options` option, and just complains about it when it sees it. See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTTP/X-Frame-Options https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTTP/X-Frame-Option...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
subway 14y ago
This is really cool, but I always feel kind of dirty putting my STL (or any other binary) files into a git repository. I hope GitHub adds support for scad files soon. In theory it should be pretty easy since they already support STL -- have openscad generate an STL from the scad files on the fly.
- ajross 14y ago
  STL has an ascii variant if you like. But the real issue is placing derived files under source control. There's no good answer here. If the STL is the output of, say, a script engine that generates parametrized parts, then of course it shouldn't be in git. If it's the output of a manual process in an interactive tool (e.g. a CAD program) then the distinction is fuzzier. It's not really the "editable source", but then neither can it be automatically derived by a build system.
  - derefr 14y ago
    > If it's the output of a manual process in an interactive tool (e.g. a CAD program) then the distinction is fuzzier. It's not really the "editable source", but then neither can it be automatically derived by a build system. It sounds like what you'd really want, in that case, would be an ASCII-encoded log-structured manipulation-history format--sort of similar to a Redis Append-Only File.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
VikingCoder 14y ago
Is the source for this STL Three.JS viewer available on GitHub? It's be nice if, when you sign in, you could change which viewer was associated with which file type. Then I could fork their viewer, add my own features, and use that.
kanzure 14y ago
Yo github... while you're bothering, here are some other things that would be handy: * Visual STL diffs, maybe by coloring deleted/added triangles. Possibly with a viewer on gh-pages or on the /:username/:reponame/commits/:branchname endpoint? * DXF sucks, but yeah DXF rendering. * Maybe consider thingiview.js (which does not use WebGL) or possibly a WebGL equivalent viewer. Controlled rotation, zooming, camera repositioning, etc. It seems that most of these features are implemented: https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/z-bottom-left.stl https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/z-bott... https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/y-motor.stl https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/y-moto... * openscad rendering- I know this is a pain in the butt, especially since openscad still requires xserver. But at least it feels more like source code. There are some other options other than openscad that could be easier to render without an xserver, which would be fine in my book, I am not particularly attached to openscad. * Other scripting/rendering options... maybe implicitcad, pythonocc (opencascade/python bindings), HeeksCAD/python, FreeCAD/python, OpenJSCAD, something like that. The problem with STL is that it's like transmitting compiled binaries to other developers, but what developers really want to work with is the source code. Having to commit STL is like having to commit compiled binaries. * UI widgets for committing from SolidWorks, Pro/Engineer, CATIA, AutoCAD, HeeksCAD, FreeCAD, and other front-ends would be really useful. I would be happy to use github.com while working on my next fighter jet project. * Upverter claims to support git, but really it's just a link to a remote git repository and you can't push your schematics to Upverter. Please feel free to eat their lying lunches. Maybe also circuitlab's (although they have never claimed to have git integration). So yeah, schematics. * Some projects require thousands of parts that need to be included when rendering, especially in assemblies. It would be nice to be able to see a fully rendered image of a version of the repository contents. This quickly devolves into a mess of file format hell, which I imagine is not something you want to tackle. But maybe this could be done through continuous integration hooks or something? For whatever it's worth, here's a terrible post-receive bash script I wrote in 2010 for scad rendering on a git server: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/gitduino-post-receive.sh.txt http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/gitduino-post-receive.sh.txt * It would be exceedingly awesome if you could get the RepRap project to jump ship from svn to git. RepRap is the largest, most well organized open source hardware project, and I think it would be a great community to work with to show how strong git is for distributed hardware development. There are already some really excellent RepRap projects in git repositories on github: https://github.com/josefprusa/PrusaMendel https://github.com/josefprusa/PrusaMendel https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/tree/master/mini https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/tree/master/mini
wereHamster 14y ago
Collada support pls.
- angersock 14y ago
  Fuck. That. Here, here's the specs for that pile of offal: http://www.khronos.org/collada/ http://www.khronos.org/collada/ It's a shitty, bad, bloated, slow, rubbish XML format. It has accumulated so much garbage in the name of interop that it is overkill for >95% of applications, and parsing/generating it is really annoying. It's a solution in search of a problem.
fafner 14y ago
Is the blog post broken for anybody else using Firefox? The font is completely messed up for me. Both in Nightly and 20.0.
- steveklabnik 14y ago
  I'm on Aurora, it's not here.
solox3 14y ago
There's also a huge market for scientific collaboration. GitHub has lots of space to grow. https://www.scigit.com https://www.scigit.com
glyphobet 14y ago
Only a matter of time before someone writes a service hook for automatic 3-D printing of a model after each push.... That or Thingiverse integration.
- aspir 14y ago
  GitHub's Make Me project might be close to what you're looking for. https://github.com/blog/1368-releasing-make-me https://github.com/blog/1368-releasing-make-me
shurcooL 14y ago
I remember a few years ago Collada was quite the popular 3D file format. What are the latest trends in that field now?
- LukeShu 14y ago
  Different fields. Collada was for 3D graphics (and I don't know what's going on in that field). STL is for manufacturing. STL has long been popular for commercial FDMs and CNC machines, and it is also what hobbyists use for their FDMs ("3D printers").
  - shurcooL 14y ago
    Ah, this is for 3D printers, no wonder it got popular enough for GitHub to add support for visualizing it. Thanks!
  - nickpinkston 14y ago
    It's not used for most CNC machines - you want a solid CAD model like STEP/IGES for this.
  - lcrs 14y ago
    The new hot kids of 3D graphics formats are http://alembic.io http://alembic.io and http://openvdb.org http://openvdb.org. Finally people are moving forward from the twenty-year-old OBJ and the horrorshow that is FBX...
- nickpinkston 14y ago
  For mechanical stuff, it's in a B-Rep model such as STEP or IGES which can be exported from SolidWorks, etc.
- cfrs 14y ago
  GL Transmission Format: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/blob/master/specification/README.md https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/blob/master/specificati... http://www.perey.com/ARStandards/Khronos_8th_AR_Standards_glTF.pdf http://www.perey.com/ARStandards/Khronos_8th_AR_Standards_gl...
tibbon 14y ago
Strange- I just pushed an STL file from a Lynx camera that was taken of me at SXSW and it won't view. Any ideas what's wrong? https://github.com/tibbon/my-3d-models/blob/master/me-in-3d.stl https://github.com/tibbon/my-3d-models/blob/master/me-in-3d....
- sshirokov 14y ago
  Your file is 11MB :(
  - tibbon 14y ago
    Oh, that might do it. I didn't realize how big of files the Lynx creates...
- Oompa 14y ago
  The error here is the blob is too big, so GitHub isn't serving it. If you try to view the raw blob, you'll hit the issue: https://raw.github.com/tibbon/my-3d-models/master/me-in-3d.stl https://raw.github.com/tibbon/my-3d-models/master/me-in-3d.s... A better error message would go a long way here :)
in_deep_thought 14y ago
wow. I built a STL file viewer and showed it to hacker news a few days ago and got absolutely no response. (www.supercuber.com). It was a different account though. I realize that this is quite a bit different than supercuber but its amazing how different the traffic to two similar links can be.
steeve 14y ago
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned https://sketchfab.com/ https://sketchfab.com/, which does this for pretty much any 3D file.
anotherbadlogin 14y ago
Why would I want to view the Standard Template Library?
shykes 14y ago
There's already a github for 3D models, it's called Sketchfab (http://sketchfab.com http://sketchfab.com) and it rocks.
- kanzure 14y ago
  > There's already a github for 3D models, it's called Sketchfab Sketchfab doesn't have native support for git repositories. You could upload a tarball of a git repository, but that's seriously missing the point.
HNLogInShit 14y ago
Why would I want to view the Standard Template Library?

STL File Viewing

153 points by bencevans 14y ago

skurmedel 14y ago

Why STL? I'd wager OBJ is a much more common interchange format for 3D models.

LukeShu 14y ago
OBJ is for 3D graphics, STL is for 3D manufacturing.
- nickpinkston 14y ago
  Though it's trial to convert between them sans color loss from OBJ to STL 1.0
- skurmedel 14y ago
  Wasn't really my point.
  - LukeShu 14y ago
    Well, github is targeting users of 3D printers, not game/graphics developers.
jbarnette 14y ago
We grabbed a 3D printer for the office a while ago.

hcarvalhoalves 14y ago

Cool, it works pretty well. Next step: support Wavefront's .OBJ files.

LukeShu 14y ago
Implementations would no doubt be similar, but here they are targeting hardware/manufacturing, not gaming/graphics.
- jonemo 14y ago
  You wrote this comment in multiple places, but it's wrong. All 3D printing services I am aware of accept OBJ. Many printer softwares accept it. In fact, as soon as you want to print in color, you have to move away from STL and OBJ would be a good choice.

s3th 14y ago

Github amazes me all the time with the sheer number of features they ship over a given time period. Major props! The STL rendering is an awesome feature.

TheLegace 14y ago
It would be great if they could setup something like this in github: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNGUJjV1zQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNGUJjV1zQ This model is a combination of stl or dae files, created with a script file that puts the coordinates of the individual stl files. I'm waiting for the day that maybe github could host full simulations and we test them out in the browser. (Now that would be cool).

elisee 14y ago

Getting the following error when loading an STL file on GitHub: Invalid 'X-Frame-Options' header encountered when loading 'https://render.github.com/view/3d/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.github.com%2FEmmanuelG%2FFoldaRap2%2Fmaster%2Fstl%2Flower-corners.stl': 'ALLOW-FROM: https://github.com/' is not a recognized directive. The header will be ignored. (from https://github.com/EmmanuelG/FoldaRap2/blob/master/stl/lower-corners.stl https://github.com/EmmanuelG/FoldaRap2/blob/master/stl/lower...) Running Chrome stable. Looks like a malformed cross-origin directive? EDIT: The error is still here but it works from time to time. Some of the time I get a "Something went wrong? Reload" message, the rest of the time, the 3D model actually appears.

sshirokov 14y ago
Chrome doesn't have support for the `ALLOW-FROM` `X-Frame-Options` option, and just complains about it when it sees it. See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTTP/X-Frame-Options https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTTP/X-Frame-Option...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

subway 14y ago

This is really cool, but I always feel kind of dirty putting my STL (or any other binary) files into a git repository. I hope GitHub adds support for scad files soon. In theory it should be pretty easy since they already support STL -- have openscad generate an STL from the scad files on the fly.

ajross 14y ago
STL has an ascii variant if you like. But the real issue is placing derived files under source control. There's no good answer here. If the STL is the output of, say, a script engine that generates parametrized parts, then of course it shouldn't be in git. If it's the output of a manual process in an interactive tool (e.g. a CAD program) then the distinction is fuzzier. It's not really the "editable source", but then neither can it be automatically derived by a build system.
- derefr 14y ago
  > If it's the output of a manual process in an interactive tool (e.g. a CAD program) then the distinction is fuzzier. It's not really the "editable source", but then neither can it be automatically derived by a build system. It sounds like what you'd really want, in that case, would be an ASCII-encoded log-structured manipulation-history format--sort of similar to a Redis Append-Only File.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

VikingCoder 14y ago

Is the source for this STL Three.JS viewer available on GitHub? It's be nice if, when you sign in, you could change which viewer was associated with which file type. Then I could fork their viewer, add my own features, and use that.

kanzure 14y ago

Yo github... while you're bothering, here are some other things that would be handy: * Visual STL diffs, maybe by coloring deleted/added triangles. Possibly with a viewer on gh-pages or on the /:username/:reponame/commits/:branchname endpoint? * DXF sucks, but yeah DXF rendering. * Maybe consider thingiview.js (which does not use WebGL) or possibly a WebGL equivalent viewer. Controlled rotation, zooming, camera repositioning, etc. It seems that most of these features are implemented: https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/z-bottom-left.stl https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/z-bott... https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/y-motor.stl https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/blob/master/mini/y-moto... * openscad rendering- I know this is a pain in the butt, especially since openscad still requires xserver. But at least it feels more like source code. There are some other options other than openscad that could be easier to render without an xserver, which would be fine in my book, I am not particularly attached to openscad. * Other scripting/rendering options... maybe implicitcad, pythonocc (opencascade/python bindings), HeeksCAD/python, FreeCAD/python, OpenJSCAD, something like that. The problem with STL is that it's like transmitting compiled binaries to other developers, but what developers really want to work with is the source code. Having to commit STL is like having to commit compiled binaries. * UI widgets for committing from SolidWorks, Pro/Engineer, CATIA, AutoCAD, HeeksCAD, FreeCAD, and other front-ends would be really useful. I would be happy to use github.com while working on my next fighter jet project. * Upverter claims to support git, but really it's just a link to a remote git repository and you can't push your schematics to Upverter. Please feel free to eat their lying lunches. Maybe also circuitlab's (although they have never claimed to have git integration). So yeah, schematics. * Some projects require thousands of parts that need to be included when rendering, especially in assemblies. It would be nice to be able to see a fully rendered image of a version of the repository contents. This quickly devolves into a mess of file format hell, which I imagine is not something you want to tackle. But maybe this could be done through continuous integration hooks or something? For whatever it's worth, here's a terrible post-receive bash script I wrote in 2010 for scad rendering on a git server: http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/gitduino-post-receive.sh.txt http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/irc/gitduino-post-receive.sh.txt * It would be exceedingly awesome if you could get the RepRap project to jump ship from svn to git. RepRap is the largest, most well organized open source hardware project, and I think it would be a great community to work with to show how strong git is for distributed hardware development. There are already some really excellent RepRap projects in git repositories on github: https://github.com/josefprusa/PrusaMendel https://github.com/josefprusa/PrusaMendel https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/tree/master/mini https://github.com/josefprusa/Prusa3/tree/master/mini

wereHamster 14y ago

Collada support pls.

angersock 14y ago
Fuck. That. Here, here's the specs for that pile of offal: http://www.khronos.org/collada/ http://www.khronos.org/collada/ It's a shitty, bad, bloated, slow, rubbish XML format. It has accumulated so much garbage in the name of interop that it is overkill for >95% of applications, and parsing/generating it is really annoying. It's a solution in search of a problem.

fafner 14y ago

Is the blog post broken for anybody else using Firefox? The font is completely messed up for me. Both in Nightly and 20.0.

steveklabnik 14y ago
I'm on Aurora, it's not here.

solox3 14y ago

There's also a huge market for scientific collaboration. GitHub has lots of space to grow. https://www.scigit.com https://www.scigit.com

glyphobet 14y ago

Only a matter of time before someone writes a service hook for automatic 3-D printing of a model after each push.... That or Thingiverse integration.

aspir 14y ago
GitHub's Make Me project might be close to what you're looking for. https://github.com/blog/1368-releasing-make-me https://github.com/blog/1368-releasing-make-me

shurcooL 14y ago

I remember a few years ago Collada was quite the popular 3D file format. What are the latest trends in that field now?

LukeShu 14y ago
Different fields. Collada was for 3D graphics (and I don't know what's going on in that field). STL is for manufacturing. STL has long been popular for commercial FDMs and CNC machines, and it is also what hobbyists use for their FDMs ("3D printers").
- shurcooL 14y ago
  Ah, this is for 3D printers, no wonder it got popular enough for GitHub to add support for visualizing it. Thanks!
- nickpinkston 14y ago
  It's not used for most CNC machines - you want a solid CAD model like STEP/IGES for this.
- lcrs 14y ago
  The new hot kids of 3D graphics formats are http://alembic.io http://alembic.io and http://openvdb.org http://openvdb.org. Finally people are moving forward from the twenty-year-old OBJ and the horrorshow that is FBX...
nickpinkston 14y ago
For mechanical stuff, it's in a B-Rep model such as STEP or IGES which can be exported from SolidWorks, etc.
cfrs 14y ago
GL Transmission Format: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/blob/master/specification/README.md https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF/blob/master/specificati... http://www.perey.com/ARStandards/Khronos_8th_AR_Standards_glTF.pdf http://www.perey.com/ARStandards/Khronos_8th_AR_Standards_gl...

tibbon 14y ago

Strange- I just pushed an STL file from a Lynx camera that was taken of me at SXSW and it won't view. Any ideas what's wrong? https://github.com/tibbon/my-3d-models/blob/master/me-in-3d.stl https://github.com/tibbon/my-3d-models/blob/master/me-in-3d....

sshirokov 14y ago
Your file is 11MB :(
- tibbon 14y ago
  Oh, that might do it. I didn't realize how big of files the Lynx creates...
Oompa 14y ago
The error here is the blob is too big, so GitHub isn't serving it. If you try to view the raw blob, you'll hit the issue: https://raw.github.com/tibbon/my-3d-models/master/me-in-3d.stl https://raw.github.com/tibbon/my-3d-models/master/me-in-3d.s... A better error message would go a long way here :)

in_deep_thought 14y ago

wow. I built a STL file viewer and showed it to hacker news a few days ago and got absolutely no response. (www.supercuber.com). It was a different account though. I realize that this is quite a bit different than supercuber but its amazing how different the traffic to two similar links can be.

steeve 14y ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned https://sketchfab.com/ https://sketchfab.com/, which does this for pretty much any 3D file.

anotherbadlogin 14y ago

Why would I want to view the Standard Template Library?

shykes 14y ago

There's already a github for 3D models, it's called Sketchfab (http://sketchfab.com http://sketchfab.com) and it rocks.

kanzure 14y ago
> There's already a github for 3D models, it's called Sketchfab Sketchfab doesn't have native support for git repositories. You could upload a tarball of a git repository, but that's seriously missing the point.

HNLogInShit 14y ago

Why would I want to view the Standard Template Library?