Real life size issues

[Revanto]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to start a new thread instead of sticking to the old one cos this is basically a new subject.

The story is that I went to get a piece of jewelry made from a design I made in Lightwave. I had to export in OBJ format in order to convert it to STL format using Meshlab but, unfortunately, it couldn't convert the mesh correclty so I had to stick with OBJ format.

The jewellers loaded up my piece into Rhino to convert it into STL format but the object came in miniscule. A 2cm cubed object in Lightwave came in at a fraction of a millimetre in Rhino. I discover that I had to scale up the object by 100,000% in Lightwave before export so the size would be correct in Rhino.

So, I was wondering if anyone else has had these sizing issues or know why it is like this?

I've heard of slight sizing issues between programs but this is ridiculous.

Revanto

[Ratboy]

In general, 1 unit = 1 meter in LW, and 1 unit = 1 millimeter in STL files.

[biliousfrog]

Depending on the software it can sometimes be useful to add a 1m cube to the scene/object before exporting and use it as a guide to scale the objects afterwards. Unfortunately scale isn't universal because AFAIK Lightwave is the only 3d app to use real-world units, other apps just use 'units' which can be inches, centimeters, miles, kilometers, whatever the user wants them to be. Because of that, only the host application will know how big the object should be.

[Salv8or]

If im working on something that needs konversion and its important with scale, I always have a 1 meter cube for reference. Its the only way to be shure that you will get it right.

Cool thou, to make you're own jewlery, may we see the result 3d vs. RW.

[Revanto]

I didn't know about the unit thing. I always thought that measurements were measurements in all programs. Thanks for that info.

Unfortunately, I can't show the designs for specific reasons. Maybe if I do another casting where the design is not too 'secret" I'll post something up but I can't make promises. Sorry.

Cheers,
Revanto :p