John Griessen wrote:
STL seems to work fine for those shapes - your tool just chooses
triangles that are long and skinny to accurately model the side
of a cylinder for instance.
... and the file size explodes. If the wires of thru hole components
are supposed to look vaguely realistic on zoom, at least 20 triangles
per cylinder are needed. The 90° bend needs another 40 triangles. Every
triangle requires 3 nodes and every node includes three coordinates
plus orientation. That way, the stl size of a simple resistor may
easily xceed the memory footprint of its footprint by two orders of
magnitude.
The other formats are wanted just for interoperability and
translation. VRML might do fine for that.
VRML is very similar to STL in that both are formats to export
from 3D CAD applications to rendering software like blender. They
both communicate just meshes, no objects. Beause of this, they
are they are less useful as imports for 3D editing. From mechanical
point of view these mesh formats are one-way roads.
---<)kaimartin(>---