Beginners to 3D printing typically start this way before developing the skills to come up with their own models. In most cases, users of 3D printers can just download a finished model off of file-sharing websites and print them at home. Since STL files are simple and have small file sizes, they are more easily shared and downloaded than other, high-fidelity alternatives. In fact, STL has become such a preferred file format that most 3D printers and slicer software used nowadays have been designed to work with STL files. They may have limitations in terms of resolution and fidelity, but so do 3D printers. The STL file format has been widely used for sharing of models within the 3D printing community.

However, the accuracy at which an STL file can approximate a surface will always be at a lower fidelity compared to file formats that represent 3D surfaces using smooth splines, such as OBJ. Naturally, a file that holds a higher resolution model will be larger. This technique is known as tessellation and is considered one of the oldest methods of simplifying a smooth surface in 3D space.īy increasing the number and decreasing the size of the triangles that form the tessellated pattern, the resolution of a 3D file in the STL format can be enhanced. Thus, instead of a truly smooth surface, an STL object is composed of a high number of very small, non-overlapping triangles. It’s also one of the oldest, developed in the 1980s and was originally meant to simplify the transfer of data from 3D CAD models to a 3D printer.Ī characteristic of the STL file format, which makes it one of the simpler options, is that it approximates a 3D surface as a triangular mesh. STL stands for “Stereolithography” and is considered one of the simplest 3D file formats. Should you find yourself with an STL file format that you’d like to tweak and play around with, what software should you use? What exactly is the STL file format, and why is it so important? What is the STL file format? Despite its ubiquity, STL files are notoriously difficult to edit. The community of 3D printing and modeling may have become much larger in the past few years, but most 3D models shared online nowadays are limited to a few file formats. 3D Insider is ad supported and earns money from clicks, commissions from sales, and other ways.

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