Is there a way to automate the conversion of STL files to the W3D format? In other words, is there a way to “tell” 3ds Max 7 to read in all of the files in a directory and convert them to the W3D format?
For example, say I have a directory called STL_FILES that holds files of type STL. Can I “call” 3ds Max in some automated fashion so that it will read all of the files in the STL_FILES directory and save them off as W3D files?
I have been told both that this can be done (via a scripting language and also, perhaps, by another language interface like Java) by one person at Discreet and that this cannot be done by another Discreet person, and I’d like to know for sure one way or the other before I invest more time into it and buy the product.
Thanks!
You can call and automate export and import functions, so it could be possible. I’ve never worked with STL files so I’m not sure, but I’ve automated a process of w3D export which works well.
Well, you can definitely get a listing of files in a directory and import them, and you can definitely export out automatically via scripting…
I’ve got that half done in a similar script that will export all selected objects in a scene to a seperate w3d file.
And also thats shown in bobo’s cg academy dvd (thanks!)
I’ve done a similar script which convert a list of IGES files to a 3DS or OBJ format.
Just use the “getfiles” fonction to get an array of files which contains “*.STL” extension.
Then by using a simple loop, you can import and merge them into a single scene; finally you just need to export the whole scene.
Don’t forget to use the #noprompt argument after the import/export functions to avoid endless validations.
Hope this will help.
Good luck
Olivier