Thumbnail Previews for 3D CAD Attachments? (.STEP, .STL, .SLDPRT, etc)

[ZQK]

Hi all,

I deal with a lot of 3D geometry files in a manufacturing context. I’d like to be able to provide automatic thumbnail previews for my uploaded .STEP, .STL, and/or .SLDPRT files. Can anyone recommend a way of doing this?

I see that the 3D Space App supports manipulatable renderings of .OBJ files, which are quite similar to .STEP files in a lot of ways. But it’s too much work for us to upload .OBJ files in addition to .STEP - I would need to find a way to automatically convert between the two formats in Airtable. Has anyone ever heard of such a thing?

Alternatively, I was imagining there could be an app that deals directly with .STEP files. I wouldn’t even need 3D renderings, just a static thumbnail preview would be enough. Has anyone heard of a solution like this?

Thanks all,
-Z

[Bill_French]

Hi @ZQK, and welcome to the community!

ZQK:

Can anyone recommend a way of doing this?

Ooooh, I did this once for STL files. Short story…

1. With STLs in attachment fields…
2. Write a script block that renders STLs by converting them to PNGs…
3. Embedding this library into a Script Block is difficult so I created a web service at AutoCode to handle that part - it’s reasonably quick and works well for the users.
4. Create a button field to display one or all STL attachments, pass the record ID with a call to the script block renderer.

You could also achieve this without the external web service or a render button on each record by developing of React (Custom App). Very confident this would work and you could address STEP, etc…

I would love to share the code here but the client is very guarded about their code.