drawing

Hi if i design my own components in catia, or solidworks, or pro-engineer, can the reprap build this compenents? thank you

As long as you export the pieces you want to print as STL files.

If they don't export to stl natively then you will probably be able to get a plugins to do it. If you can't do that then you will probably be able to export to some other mesh format and use another program to convert to stl. It is very unlikely that whatever program you use you will end up with designs that you can't get to stl somewhow.

solidworks does a fair job on stl, so no worries

Even blender does (blender is way cheaper )
Meshlab seams to be nice for the job but didn't had enough time to test it completely yet (also free).

keep in mind that you ned nonmanifold and watertight meshes to generate a printable stl.
Sounds easier as it is actually, so keep cool, relax and edit the vertices
Just because it looks good on a rendering is not enough unfortunately .

'sid

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/01/2008 06:44PM by sid.