Difficulty getting STEP output

Grasshopper
1

Hello, I am trying to save a mesh (created in Grasshopper) into a STEP file. I understand that in order for Rhino to create a STEP from a baked Grasshopper output the bodies being output need to be NURBS surfaces, rather than meshes. My issue is that the only way I know how to properly create the panel’s optical features is to use what I believe to be mesh tools. Is there a list of tools that only create NURBS surfaces in Rhino/Grasshopper? I have attached some screenshots of what the entire panel (with all 2,500 optics), and a detail view of a single optic, as well as my Grasshopper script (that I have already received help on this forum creating, THANK YOU!). If anyone is aware of another software that might be able to convert a STL file to a STEP I am willing to try that as well. Thank you

Optic detail view
Optic detail view1384×824 203 KB

Overall of part
Overall of part1386×814 399 KB

STEP output error message
STEP output error.gh (21.3 KB)

2

in v8, run the shrinkwrap command to get a good unified mesh. then run quadremesh to get good quads.

then run tosubd to convert to a subd then run tonurbs to convert to nurbs.

understand some detail softening will happen in this process which can be limited by making a very dense mesh, but will result in a very large file.

you can then output a step file.

3

The process @theoutside is describing required the V8 Work-In-Progress build for those tools.

4

Hi Joel - the details look like they are surfaces already - is the problem in the underlying panels, are those a mesh?

-Pascal

5

Hi Joel -
All the objects that are created in your Grasshopper definition are NURBS objects. I’ve BooleanUnioned a few of those and exported as STEP without issues.
image

STEP output error-Export.zip (1.7 MB)

… so there must be something else going on in your file.
-wim

6

I didn’t realize that, I thought that the Pipe tool creates meshes instead of NURBS objects. I just tried baking the file with one group of optics (out of the 10 that are shown in the original post) and it worked correctly no issues, so now I know where to focus on for now. Thank you again!

7

Thank you everyone for the prompt information! I will look into getting the WIP Version 8 installed and play around with it, as I can’t wait for multithreading to work its way into my projects with Grasshopper 2.