Solved: Convert Surface To Solid
Download FreeCad then import the stl file in the 'mesh design' work space. At this point you can clean up your stl using the mesh design tools. Switch to the 'part' work space click on the stl file in the left plane then click on the part menu, scroll down to 'create part from mesh' then wait. If the mesh is very dense it may take a while. You can use other programs like MeshLab to reduce the mesh density to shorten the conversion time. Export the solid model as an stp file. Solidworks, Design Magic both will read in the file and allow its manipulation.
I know that SW users will angry with me but i should say it:) If you need it for reverse engineering first get rid of SW. Solidworks have very limited capabilities about working with STL mesh files and reverse engineering. If you want rapid solution Inus technologies can be effective(especially XOR series are very effective). However iam agree with STEF that they are not cheap solutions. If you have just single project that contain stl data and geometry isnt too complex,then Cemal's solution is enough.
Also its freeware ( I mean MeshLab) Of course there are some other ways by business plan. For example if we consider you need that conversation ( STL = CAD Type) just for actual project. You can post it to some freelance sites as job posting. So Someone can do it for you with low prices. If I recall correctly, Solidworks' STL import utility has a maximum of 20k facets.
For objects with over 20k facets, I recommend opening the STL in MeshLab as Cemal recommends then exporting or saving as a.dwg file. In Solidworks you must got go file - open and select the.dwg file extension in the drop down menu. Opening will walk you through a wizard. Be warned- using this utility to import files into SW is extremely processor and memory intensive.
SW will create a plane and sketch for each facet of the dwg file in an attempt to make a part. There are often geometry errors that aren't always fixable within SW. Mine took overnight to import a file with 40k fascets and i've got an intel i7 with 8Gb ram and a SSD drive. If possible, avoid importing large STL files into SW because it is extremely taxing on your system. SW will crash if you run out of RAM.
It can be done, but i recommend using it as a last resort. Basic considerations for the less experienced with cad files A well constructed solid model, made up of the least complex geometric entities (lines arcs, surfaces defined by them) is ideal and stable and can be shared without degradation in a solid format (STEP, parasolid, SAT ) IGES and STL files do not contain the original reference geometry to reconstruct the solid and will at the very best result in an approximation. What happens is the resulting surfaces have many control points (both along and across) that are exponetially more complex and degraded.
As a number of these poorly defined surfaces are used to construct your model process gets time consuming, inaccurate and unstable. As your human model as stl has far to many control points to process efficiently. A client making breast implants, laser scanned the handmade model with many thousands of points and had a team trying to manipulate the meshes. I digitized a 9 points around to generate the drive curve, 7 from the nipple down 7 from the nipple up made the along curves and swept a surface that was the very natural looking and easy to manipulate. Say the tibia, leg bone, the long section can be lofted with widely spaced simple splines made of a few points from the stl. With slices more closely spaced as the rate of curvature increases. You have far to much data.
The moral of the story is STL is pretty much last choice for making a solid and because it is a dense mesh of triangles some means of extracting the least complex geometry to generate a stable workable model will yield professional results. My first comment is 'STL is not a graphics file,' it's a 3D data format. My second comment is 'STL is intended to be an output file, not an input file.'
Your best bet, if you really want to use STL to do what you're suggesting, is to get access to software designed to convert 'point cloud data' into a surface. What is an STL file?
It's basically a file which 'slices' a 3D model into a series of very thin 2D 'layers.' This output is then used to drive a stereolithography (or similar) machine which produces physical prototypes through layer-by-layer deposition. This file format is not a CAD format, nor is it a graphics format. It is merely the final step before making that physical part.
Each layer consists of a series of line segments, each of which consists of two end vertices. It is possible, with some data-import packages, to load up these vertex points as though they are laser-scanned 'point cloud' data. In this case, the 3D software can convert this into an equivalent 3D surface set, which can then be transformed into a solid (if the data is complete). That's your ONLY option, and it will not give you parametric, history-based models and assemblies. But it's enough to get you sufficient information to rebuild the part with a high degree of accuracy to the original design intent. Onur Aytekin is right. Solidworks software is very limited in translating STL files.
Large amounts of facets in STL file and Soldworks software crashes. True, STL files can be imported as Graphics body but who wants to spend endless hours creating sketches and solids from sketches of the picture? It is shame that Solidworks makers are unwilling to make improvements in this area. I am Solidworks user since year 2000 and I see not much improvement in this software from year to year.
I compared Solidworks vs Inventor. Inventor is harder to sketch with when creating parts. Parts library needs to be precisely located within a folder. Inventor however has better gear design software and FEA simulation then Solidworks. I am working in Solidworks with large scans,.stl imports (via scanto3d) of an ATV.
A 4 wheeler kind of thing. There's actually two different/similar ATV models (we actually scanned two different bikes) overlaying each other. For reference, SW takes about 20Gb of ram to get these fired up, part&assy files are in the 3gb range. SW is sluggish at best with files of this size even on a very fast machine. So I get these scans into solidworks and they are a mesh.
I refine them some with SW's mesh tools. End of the day I've got a big (2-5mil triangles) messy mesh, but lots of 3d points I can attach to. Sadly, this does not work in an assembly which is where I spent 99% of my time designing, I have to actually open each part, create a 3d sketch and drop a point where I want to attach to the mesh.
Then back out, save, switch over to the assy and do design attaching to that sketch point. Slow and painful There's no 'averaging' many points to account for error either. Like taking more than 3 points to define a circle. I'm hoping someone will have some better tools to work with meshes than is built into solidworks. I have some experience with large complex STL graphics files (e.g. From micro-CT scans and laser topography) and successfully importing them into SOLIDWORKS automatically as a full solid model. Therefore I wanted to try and provide maybe a slightly more complete answer than most of the previous answers.
First of all, SOLIDWORKS needs your imported STL file to have a maximum of around 20 thousand facets if you wish to automatically represent the imported geometry as a solid body (through the method outlined previously by Sudhir Gill above). If your STL file has more than 20 thousand facets but less than 100 thousand (I believe) then SOLIDWORKS can automatically represent it as surface entities (using the same method but choosing Surface Body in the import options). My advice is to use a freely available mesh visualisation/analysis/repair/filtering software application such as MeshLab from SourceForge to open your STL file before attempting to import into SOLIDWORKS. MeshLab will deal with multi-million facet STL files (if you have a reasonable spec PC) and will tell you at the bottom how many facets your STL file has. MeshLab is also very useful in that it can rapidly cut the number of facets in an STL file to a given target number of facets (e.g.
The 20 thousand or less required by SOLIDWORKS) although some geometrical accuracy is of course sacrificed. If anyone would like some pointers on some of the tools in MeshLab which can be used for this job then please ask.
STL is a bunch of dumb triangles. Thats called 'Discrete Geometry' A CAD file is mathematically perfect Geometry, called 'Continuous Geometry'.
CAD interpolates points or triangles. There is no possible conversion, but must be interpolation therefore. Plenty of ways. Totally depends on the model and the needed output. Do you need it for claiming the remaining space, does it have to be smooth or as close to the facets as possible? Is it organic or more cubes & cylinders like?
Best use a demo download of some sophisticated software. Geomagic WRAP creates a spiderweb style network automatically, good for organic.
The same functionality sits hidden in the cheap Geomagic Design (formerly Alibre). For more analytic forms better use a true reverse engineering solution. Spaceclaim is pretty good and affordable with redrawing profiles and easily drag them into the right space. For Solidworks, use the 3DSystems Plugin. Cutting lots of sections into the STL is a good start so your CAD can at least touch something in space rather than importing a dumb STL file and looking at it. ZW3D started also some Reverse Engineering.
Solved Convert Surface To Solidworks
The big gun is Geomagic Design X which may even export the history tree (good luck), but expensive. 'Converting' is nonsense. That might only give you thousands of planes, killing the performance of any system with no possible downstream process. Do you Have Solidworks Pro or Premium? If so, you will have access to the scan-to-3d module, just activate it in add-ins.
After that, when you go to import, you will have a new option: 'Scan-to-3D meshes.' That option allows you to import it as more than a graphics body. You can align to world origin, extract cross sections, region group (feature recognition), and surface wrap. It is pretty lightweight and it can take a lot of cleanup to get a good auto-surface, so if this is something you do a lot you are better off with one of the various Geomagic products.
Like others mentioned, Spaceclaim also does surface wrapping and general scan-to-CAD it and is cheaper than Geomagic, though I can't vouch for how good the surface wrapping is. The real question is how to convert an STL file to a modifiable Solid Works file. The reason for this that has not been mentioned here is sometimes you already have an STL file that was created or downloaded by someone else that you want to modify to change a few things. I have often needed this for 3D printing.
I have downloaded files from thingiverse and wanted to make some minor changes to the part. The person here that said download FreeCad and save the file out as a Step file was on the right track but there is no need to do that. Here is the correct method that works. 1) Open the STL file in Solid Works as a solid body. To do this select the file type as STL and click the options button and select 'SOLID BODY' from the radio buttons in the middle of the dialog. 2) After you open the file select 'Save AS' from the file menu.
Convert Surfaces To Solid Solidworks
Change the 'Save As' file type to 'STEP AP214' and save the file. 3) Now open the step file and you will be able to select any surface to sketch on. When you are done editing simply save the file as a Solid Works part file. I think this is what everyone is really looking for here.
If STEP can't translate it into a solid and back, then you'll have a hard time doing it manually. You'll need to repair every tiny gap and every loose end.
I'm afraid that the surfaces to solid assistant in UG will not work either. You'll have to use every command available within UG. I hope you have the free form module available. Remember that Sew is a very tricky command.
If you apply to high a tolerance to bridge a gap between surfaces, they will only be sewn visually. Underlying definitions of the surfaces will still have the gap. This may cause problems later on. It's hard, but the best option is to go to the one how sent you the STEP and tell him/her it's a mess. RE: How to convert a closed surface to a solid (Mechanical) 28 Nov 06 10:15. Snowfire, First of all, knowing which version of NX you're using would really help when it comes to showing you what commands to use, as their locations can change from one version of NX to the next.or they could even be completely renamed. Regardless, please state your version of NX when posting a question.
Next, make SURE the STEP file was exported as a solid and not surfaces. Some CAD softwares allow for surfaces only in STEP files and that might be why you're looking at a surface model in NX. Also check your STEP import options in NX.
Set it to import solids only unless you don't mind surfaces slipping through. If you set your STEP Import Options to solids only, then you don't have to worry about someone accidentally making a surface-only STEP file.it won't import the surfaces. Check your model tolerance in NX. If your modeling tolerance is tighter (smaller) than the software that exported the STEP model, then you're wasting your time trying to get a solid from the STEP file. The tolerances need to either match or NX's tolerance needs to be larger. That's just my personal opinion.
Hard to convince me that a larger toleranced STEP file would import as a valid solid into a tighter tolerance in NX, but I've seen stranger things happen with CAD before. You can use many techniques to repair the imported geometry. Some might include finding the areas with missing surfaces and using the adjacent surface edges to create a Through Curves (TC's) Through Curve Mesh (TCM's), N-Sided Surface, or any other surface command that allows you to control continuity (tangency, curvature, etc.). You might have to use Bridge Curves if the adjacent surfaces are a mess as well. Should you find a small gap rather than missing surfaces, you can try to edit individual surfaces and untrim (Edit - Surface - Boundary) them back to their original shape prior to trimming then re-trim to desired boundaries.
Sometimes this prior trimming information is not retained in the translation of the surfaces, other times it is. If you can untrim, then re-trim surfaces, that will be your best option for preserving the original topology (shape), however, we don't live in a perfect world and you might have no choice other than to rebuild some of the surfaces as mentioned above. As caddict pointed out, being able to play around with the model would help us help you. I hope some of this proves to be helpful. Tim Flater Senior Designer Enkei America, Inc. RE: How to convert a closed surface to a solid.