When I last reported on 3Dprintler back in January, the team was at CES 2016 in Las Vegas promoting their newly launched API platform, intended to help designers market their designs and compare the print prices from different vendors all across the 3D printing industry. This was a big breakthrough for designers looking to have their 3D models printed and distributed; there was finally a way for them to compare prices from 3D printing vendors such as Shapeways, i.materialise, and Sculpteo. At the time, their API platform provided estimated prices for over 256 materials, and offered services from a number of a 3D printing vendors, but it appears that there was one area that still needed improvement.
After talking to hundreds of 3D print enthusiasts at CES 2016, 3Dprintler had received some valuable feedback on their API, and soon discovered that they were lacking in the number of file formats that could be used for price comparison. They obviously listened to that feedback too, having just announced that a total of 24 file types are now compatible with their price comparison API. Here is the extensive list of the file formats that 3Dprintler now supports:
- 3DS AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max binary mesh files;
- ASC ASC 3D points cloud files;
- ASE AutoCAD ASCII export files;
- BYU Movie.BYU surface geometry files;
- DXF AutoCAD DXF files;
- GMOD Golgotha GMOD files;
- HRC SoftImage hierarchical files;
- IV SGI Inventor files;
- OBJ WaveFront Advanced Visualizer ASCII files; a file format from Alias;
- OFF GEOMVIEW OFF files;
- POV Persistence of Vision files (output only);
- SMF Michael Garland’s format for his QSLIM program;
- STL/STLA Standard Triangulation Language files
- STLB binary STL files;
- SWM Syndicate Wars game maps and structures file format (input only);
- SWV Syndicate Wars game vehicles primveh file format (input only);
- TEC TECPLOT files (output only);
- TRI/TRIA a simple ASCII triangle format requested by Greg Hood;
- TRIB a simple binary triangle format requested by Greg Hood;
- TXT a text dump (output only);
- UCD Advanced Visual Systems (AVS) Unstructured Cell Data (output only);
- VLA Evans and Sutherland Digistar II VLA files for planetariums;
- WRL/VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) files (output only).
- XGL , based on the XML language and OpenGl graphics (output only).
In addition to the expansion of file type support, 3Dprintler has also implemented a Dropbox API into their own. Now, users can sync their 3D design files directly to the 3Dprintler platform through Dropbox, which the team says will help improve the functionality, accuracy, and overall experience of their API. Since releasing their API at CES 2016 last month, 3Dprintler is already aiming to expand upon and improve their platform right away. By utilizing the feedback from the 3D printing community, 3Dprintler was able to fill the holes within their API, and provide an experience that works for every 3D designer and print enthusiast.
