Convert to jpg file

[burdeinyi]

Sorry for a silly question. Is here a way to take something like a snapshot of stl file in jpeg format? If it is not, may somebody know how to do this stuff? Thanks.

[Uvar]

That would involve specifying your viewpoint (origin and direction), subsequently squashing your mesh faces which are visible (Raytracing?) into a 2D view, then rendering the view. I think the Cura source code might prove to be a valuable source of information on how to achieve this.

[wolph]

It's actually fairly easy to do with matplotlib, the examples are almost exactly what you need except that instead of showing it on the screen you wish to write to a file:

from stl import mesh
from mpl_toolkits import mplot3d
from matplotlib import pyplot

# Create a new plot
figure = pyplot.figure()
axes = mplot3d.Axes3D(figure)

# Load the STL files and add the vectors to the plot
your_mesh = mesh.Mesh.from_file('tests/stl_binary/HalfDonut.stl')
axes.add_collection3d(mplot3d.art3d.Poly3DCollection(your_mesh.vectors))

# Auto scale to the mesh size
scale = your_mesh.points.flatten(-1)
axes.auto_scale_xyz(scale, scale, scale)

# Show the plot to the screen
# pyplot.show()

# Write the plot to a file
figure.savefig('mesh.png')

Note that this saves as a png instead of a jpg, for the images generated those will most likely be smaller and higher quality.