[Chimera-users] Export options for x3d2stl

[Hurt, Darrell (NIH/NIAID) [E]]

Hi Chimera friends,

Here's the second question of the day. Thanks for your patience with me.

When I export the scene as an STL (for 3D printing), I think what happens is that Chimera outputs first an X3D file and then runs the utility program "x3d2stl" to create the STL. The X3D file is about 5 MB, but the STL is about 100 MB. I understand that much of this size inflation is because the "primitives" in X3D have to be converted to mesh objects for STL. However, when I look at the STL file, the meshes derived from the primitives are finer than I really need.

I find that I can "get away with" a coarser meshification by using x3d2stl on the command line:

x3d2stl -c -r 2 -o sticks.stl < sticks.x3d

If I want to export the scene via the command line within Blender, is there any way to issue options to x3d2stl? Or should I just run x3d2stl outside of Blender?

Thanks,
Darrell

--
Darrell Hurt, Ph.D.
Section Head, Computational Biology
Bioinformatics and Computational Biosciences Branch (BCBB)
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