Editable .3dm file content via IM-format?

Rhino Rhino for Windows
1

Yes, I would like to be able to access some of the model info using regex tools, and I gathered from another post that no, .3dm doesn’t support that (well, that was obvious by opening it in a text editor).

Q1: But is there any lossless export format (“intermediate format”) in which I could do my modifications (like modifying object names, layer names, group names etc) and then import the model back into Rhino again?

Lossless export-import means that I might not want to discover that on my own, and since .3dm is not very DIFF-tool friendly I wouldn’t even know what and how much I lost…

Q2: Therefore, I’d like to also ask if there ever has been any plans to make a more diff-friendly model format? XML of Json, sorted with DIFF in mind (as to maintain object order), would be very helpful.

// Rolf

2

The 3dm read/write API is open source and freely available, for example using RhinoCommon. Using that, you can modify object, layer, group names, and much more.

What more do you want?

3
  1. Text format,
  2. Modifying content using Regex (with tools like EditpadPro, PowerGrep etc which I use heavily to update source code when programming)
  3. DIFF-friendly for detailed tracing of changes.

“Direct access” to all of the above by any text format that would allow it. .3dm will not support it, but I could do with a export format.

// Rolf

4

A text based format would be fine.
Or, a documented (text or binary) format would be also fine

But I guess that these things are left to us to develop :slight_smile:

BTW In Rhino 5 RhinoCommon does not cover all the data that the C++ SDK covers
I hope Rhino 6 will fix that

1 Like
5

In that case, use either STEP or IGES format. Both are text based. The former supports more features, like polysurfaces and blocks.

6

Is it lossless? (when re-importing)

// Rolf

7

I tried exporting to STEP, reimport, then Export again and finally reimport again. Haven’t tried diff yet, but “lossless” doesn’t seem to be the case.

// Rolf