Writing to STL files

Posted by Jiro Doke, June 5, 2009

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Jiro's pick this week is surf2stl by Bill McDonald.

About a month ago, at a seminar I gave at a university, a graduate student came up to me and asked whether there was a function for writing out 3D model files. Specifically, he was referring to STL files (stereolithography files). It was a topical question because it came soon after I talked about some of the exporting capabilities in MATLAB for graphical file formats.

I knew that we didn't have any built in, but I promptly suggested checking out the File Exchange. I've seen a few functions for reading from STL files, so I figured there would be counterparts. Sure enough, there were a few. Here's a list of entries with a tag of "stl".

From the list, I am highlighting Bill's surf2stl. It has nice help, clean code, good reviews, and has even inspired another entry.