When I import an STL that was designed in inches and the STL options were set to inches the part comes in very small. Likely it came in as mm. I want to scale this back to inches, so I adjust the scale value to 25.4 (the mm to inch conversion), and the part increases in size, but I have no way to know if this scale was applied as I am assuming it would be.
To test the scaling factor I designed a box that would fit the max build volume as advertised on the Form2 home page, I built one model as 145x145x175mm and another in inches, 5.709x5.709x6.890in. I imported the inch model and scaled it by 25.4mm and was told it was outside of the legal build area. I imported the metric STL and got the same error, but didn’t need to scale the file.
Conclusion:
The build area is not quite as large as advertised.
There is no way to check measurements in PreForm.
Does anyone know if my scaling strategy will produce inch parts to the correct size?
STL File Format: “STL coordinates must be positive numbers, there is no scale information, and the units are arbitrary.”
I am not a CAD designer, just was thrown the task of printing jobs on this printer. I am not capable of confirming that…just regurgitating what I learn!
I conducted another test and changed my mm and inch boxes to 127x127x152.4mm and 5x5x6in. Went through the steps above and can see the two boxes overlap correctly.
@kevinduhe, Thanks for the tip. that works perfectly. You do need to select the part and then the option Model Units is available. This will be a huge time saver for me.
It may be worth looking into what options your modeling software has for .STL export. I am able to model in whatever units I want but when I export as an .STL the conversion to mm happens automagically.
Clicking models and toggling between in and mm is good enough, but not effortless. I would think it’s worth looking into if you create a lot of your own models.
