rgl: readSTL – R documentation

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readSTL

Read and write STL (stereolithography) format files

Description

These functions read and write STL files. This is a simple file format that is commonly used in 3D printing. It does not represent text, only triangles. The writeSTL function converts some RGL object types to triangles.

Usage

readSTL(con, ascii = FALSE, plot = TRUE, ...)
writeSTL(con, ascii = FALSE, 
         pointRadius = 0.005, 
         pointShape = icosahedron3d(),
         lineRadius = pointRadius,
         lineSides = 20,
         ids = NULL)

Arguments

`con`	A connection or filename.
`ascii`	Whether to use the ASCII format or the binary format.
`plot`	On reading, should the object be plotted?
`...`	If plotting, other parameters to pass to `triangles3d`
`pointRadius, lineRadius`	The radius of points and lines relative to the overall scale of the figure.
`pointShape`	A mesh shape to use for points. It is scaled by the `pointRadius`.
`lineSides`	Lines are rendered as cylinders with this many sides.
`ids`	The identifiers (from `ids3d`) of the objects to write. If `NULL`, try to write everything.

Details

The current implementation is limited. For reading, it ignores normals and color information. For writing, it only outputs triangles, quads, planes, spheres, points, line segments, line strips and surfaces, and does not write color information. Lines and points are rendered in an isometric scale: if your data scales vary, they will look strange.

Since the STL format only allows one object per file, all RGL objects are combined into a single object when output.

The output file is readable by Blender and Meshlab; the latter can write in a number of other formats, including U3D, suitable for import into a PDF document.

Value

readSTL invisibly returns the object id if plot = TRUE, or (visibly) a matrix of vertices of the triangles if not.

writeSTL invisibly returns the name of the connection to which the data was written.

Author(s)

Duncan Murdoch

References

The file format was found on Wikipedia on October 25, 2012. I learned about the STL file format from David Smith's blog reporting on Ian Walker's r2stl function.

Examples

filename <- tempfile(fileext = ".stl")
open3d()
shade3d( icosahedron3d(col = "magenta") )
writeSTL(filename)
open3d()
readSTL(filename, col = "red")

rgl

3D Visualization Using OpenGL

v0.106.8

GPL

Authors

Duncan Murdoch [aut, cre], Daniel Adler [aut], Oleg Nenadic [ctb], Simon Urbanek [ctb], Ming Chen [ctb], Albrecht Gebhardt [ctb], Ben Bolker [ctb], Gabor Csardi [ctb], Adam Strzelecki [ctb], Alexander Senger [ctb], The R Core Team [ctb, cph], Dirk Eddelbuettel [ctb], The authors of Shiny [cph], The authors of knitr [cph], Jeroen Ooms [ctb], Yohann Demont [ctb], Joshua Ulrich [ctb], Xavier Fernandez i Marin [ctb], George Helffrich [ctb], Ivan Krylov [ctb]

Initial release