You know what, here’s a chart to show what I mean: For full color printing of textures and logos I still use VRMLs and OBJs, but CAD files can export body colors into GrabCAD Print, and you can do a surprising amount with just those, with no extra effort.

Now, I have heard rumors of ‘color STLs’ from time to time, and the new-ish 3MF format does support exporting face and body colors, which is nice. So why not avoid all that hassle and just work with the CAD data when you can, letting GrabCAD Print’s internal slicer decide what resolution is best? Reason #2: You Lose Color But as experienced operators will tell you, the first time a large group of people try to export STLs for printing, many of them will use a too low STL resolution and make their part tessellated, and many will use too high a resolution and make their file size huge. Of course, 3D printing is a finite process, so after going above a certain resolution, it doesn’t matter to the 3D printer, the print will look the same. Think of that hole in the middle here- on the CAD file, it will be perfectly defined as a mathematical, geometric circle, but in the STL, you’ll have a sort of ‘stop-sign’ tessellation effect, depending on the resolution you exported at:Īnd even worse than that, once someone gives me an STL, I can’t ‘enhance’ the resolution in any way, but I can always convert the CAD file at higher and higher resolutions, with a simple slider in my CAD package. So we all know that STLs are thousands of touching triangles, versus native engineering CAD files, which are defined mathematically:

So let me present: 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Use STLs for 3D Printing (Anymore) Which is fine, a lot of other 3D printers still don’t have the option to import anything besides STLs or 3MFs, but I just wanted to write a quick something to give that 52% a reason to give native CAD another look. Even though GrabCAD Print has been able to directly import engineering CAD files for about 3 years now, a recent survey of our customers revealed that nearly 52% still use STLs to 3D print, not native files from SOLIDWORKS, Inventor, Creo or CATIA.

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