The program STEPToPoints is a command line utility to generate point clouds out of solids contained in STEP files. The supported output file format is xyz (vertex positions and normal vectors). A popular viewer for the supported file format is MeshLab (https://www.meshlab.net). STEPToPoints is based on OpenCASCADE (https://www.opencascade.com). The program uses cxxops (https://github.com/jarro2783/cxxopts) for parsing the command line.
- CMake installation (https://cmake.org)
- Visual Studio C++ installation (https://visualstudio.microsoft.com)
- OpenCASCADE installation (https://old.opencascade.com/content/latest-release, download needs registration)
Listing the contents (solids) of a STEP file:
STEPToPoints -c -i <step file>
Generating point clouds for selected solids of the file:
STEPToPoints -i <step file> -o <output file> -g <sampling distance> -s <solid1>,<solid2>,<...>
Following the help text from the command line:
STEPToPoints.exe
STEP to point cloud conversion by regular sampling
Usage:
STEPToPoints [OPTION...]
-i, --in arg Input file
-o, --out arg Output file
-c, --content List content (solids)
-s, --select arg Select solids by name or index (comma seperated list,
index starts with 1)
-g, --sampling arg Sampling distance
-h, --help Print usage
Examples are from the examples directory.
| Solids |
|---|
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| Point cloud with normal vectors |
|---|
STEPToPoints.exe -i basic_shapes.stp -o out.xyz -g 0.5 |
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This code has been tested with an OpenCASCADE 7.5.0 prebuilt binary (opencascade-7.5.0-vc14-64.exe) on Windows, as well as OpenCASCADE system packages on openSUSE Linux. With changes in the configuration section in the CMakeLists.txt file the build should also work with other OpenCASCADE versions.