Convert GO STEP files to LDraw parts

[zepom]

Hi there,

I am getting crazy trying to find a way to convert the STEP files for VEX GO in order to be able to use them in SnapCad… I found quickly that converting the STEP file to an ASCII STL and then to a .dat file that can be used in an LDraw parts library, but I was not able to keep the colors of the original model. Of course this is not a problem for most of the parts, but it is for the electronics. Do you know if this is possible and how to proceed?

Thank you in advance for any help you can give me!

[Gary_Osborne]

VEX SnapCAD Library Updates

Our teams have been using SnapCAD extensively the last two years. Are there any plans to update the library of parts to include many of the parts made in the past 2 years? Some older VEX parts where never included but it would be nice to have them, including newer game elements from rise above.

[holbrook]

@zepom

Do you know if this is possible and how to proceed?

Possible, sure, but probably not easy enough to be worth doing.

My python script for converting from STL to LDraw converts each triangle in the STL into a line type 3 command (“filled triangle drawn between three points”), and assigns each triangle color #16, which is a special color code that basically means “use whatever color the user has currently selected”.

In theory you could go through each of the lines (all 10000+ of them) and assign the correct color to each triangle, but this would not be a practical solution to the problem.

You could probably write a program of some sort to convert from STEP to LDraw directly, while preserving the color data that is already in the STEP, but I’m not sure how easy that would be or what the program would look like.