Working with stl files

[donest]

I've struggled with this problem for many years. After importing an stl file, I can do nothing with it except scale and non-p scale. We have a small digitizer at work that produces an stl file that you can trim, or grab CVs and move in order to alter the file. When I get an stl file from the internet, this is not so. Is there a feature in Alias that will convert an stl file into a nurbs surface?

[AaronSevern]

STL files are loaded as meshes in Alias and you can work with them using any of the mesh tools. Alias does not automatically convert meshes to NURBS. You can use tools like fit scan and surface from mesh to create NURBS surfaces on your mesh data, but this obviously requires quite a bit of work.

[shinji-pons]

As Aaron says, this requires manual work within Alias. Using the Retopo tool is another way to do this in Alias using SubDs.

There are tools in other software that do automatic mesh retopology - QuadRemesher for example - and you can import that geometry as SubDs in Alias. It won't be perfect geometry that being said. 

[Anonymous]

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@MyAARPMedicare wrote:

I've struggled with this problem for many years. After importing an stl file, I can do nothing with it except scale and non-p scale. We have a small digitizer at work that produces an stl file that you can trim, or grab CVs and move in order to alter the file. When I get an stl file from the internet, this is not so. Is there a feature in Alias that will convert an stl file into a nurbs surface?

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Well to be precise, STL files are even not meshes, but triangles soups. Which means that triangles are even not connected to each other (well they need to be adjacent to be used by software generatif g-code, but no obligation else)

just for clarification: g-code format is just a sequence of instructions for the machines (3d-printers, etc) so it's very good for printers, but also certainly the worst format to manipulate geometry.