which software can handle large STL ?

Hi,

I'm in the stage of POC (proof of concept) of a STL mesh processing
project. Instead of write the code from scratch, I hope I can
base on one open source project.

The STL file comes from a high resolution geometry measurement
instrument which could has up to 10e+7 facet !!!
All of the facet can not be modified.

What I need is
select points, select surfaces, measure distance, area,
fast 3D rotation, resize, translate ...

Could someone please help to suggest which package is good
for these large scale STL "low-level" processing. And with
APIs which I can used to integrate the function for my
customized GUI. Thanks a lot.

Best Regards,
KC

Hi KC,

Gmsh and Salome can both handle STL, both progrmas are meshers. Salome has a lot of functions but I don't think it is still suitable for large amounts of data (this has been a normal complaint among its users). I don't use that often Salome and certainly notwith large data , so I cannot give you a real opinion. Gmsh handles quite well large data, but I think it cannot run in paralell and it's a bit more difficult to handle, it's GUI is minimal,most of the work is done through scripts.
I think you'll be much better using Blender, which is a 3D modeller (in the fashion of Maya and 3d Studio Max) and does handle STL, probabaly it work swell with large data as it is used for animation work. FreeCAD also handles STL and is quite userfriendly.
So far I've mentioned softswares included in CAELinux. A program intended for large mesh editing, which will certainly do your job (according to the description I've read) is MeshLab, also Open Source, but you'll have to install it by yourself. I don't run the current Ubuntu based CAELinux so I don't know if you can get it from the Ubuntu repos, but in any case you can compile it yuorself or ask to get it packed.
Hope that helps.

PD: where's the Sunshine Band ?

Hi CAVT,

Thanks for the reply.
I'm now checking netgen, and will try meshlab later.

Best Regards,
KC

ps. I'm wandering where is the Sunshine Band too