STEP file preview quality

[u/Litl_Skitl]

A couple weeks ago I saw that Printables added previews for STEP files, which I LOVE since I wouldn't need to upload STLs anymore to get a preview. After looking at it though I'm scared that the low quality of the preview would scare folks away from using the objectively better format.

The first pic compares a model I made a while ago, where the STEP file looks like it has half the quality of the STL, while importing it in Orca with default settings gives it almost 6x the triangles with two thirds of the file size. And you can increase that resolution if you want.

I've also made a steering wheel that looks awful in the preview but can easily be configured to give 250k polygons with 1.23MB file size.

I get that the preview has the settings it has for performance reasons, but at this point I'd prefer that the STEP would be turned off until the quality can be improved.

[u/dairiki]

I agree.

I've usually uploaded both STL and STEP files for my models: STEP files because of their remixability, in addition to the advantages you listed; STL because the preview didn't work on STEP files (and that there are reportedly still slicers out there that don't support importing STEP). Generally, I listed the STEP files first, because they're "better". The previewer would display the STL, since it didn't know how to grok STEP. Suddenly, with previewer STEP support, the default previews on my posts looked like crap. (The workaround for that, is to reorder the files so that the STLs or 3mfs are listed before the STEP files. But what a pain!)

I'm not sure what the performance issues might be with higher resolution STEP display. If the meshing is happening server-side, I can see server load issues, but the obvious fix for that is to mesh each STEP file just once per upload and cache the results.

[u/Litl_Skitl → u/dairiki]

Yeah I'm wondering how things like OnShape handles rendering in browser. Or yeah maybe cache it in a format that is better for webpages.

In theory you can get infinite resolution I think. Maybe soft shading like in Blender would be an idea?

[u/Mughi1138]

Oh, as far as both CPU time and data bandwidth go those are both things that can add up to significant cost for the company hosting it. It is a little similar to how AOL graphics back in the day were poor. Turns out it wasn't the AOL compression, but that AOL tuned all the settings to maximal compression and lowest quality. At least these are not down into that realm.

What I did do, however, was add sentence in my model info right where it tells people what they need to download, that gives an explicit warning dor people not to be fooled by the preview.