STEPToPoints

Description

The program STEPToPoints is a command line utility to generate point clouds out of solids contained in STEP files. The supported output file format is xyz (vertex positions and normal vectors). A popular viewer for the supported file format is MeshLab (https://www.meshlab.net). STEPToPoints is based on OpenCASCADE (https://www.opencascade.com). The program uses cxxops (https://github.com/jarro2783/cxxopts) for parsing the command line.

Requirements

• CMake installation (https://cmake.org)
• OpenCASCADE installation (https://old.opencascade.com/content/latest-release, download needs registration)

For OpenCASCADE if it is not found it will be fetched and built via CMake FetchContent. For that, you need the following additional libs installed:

• tcl-dev
• tk-dev

On Linux you can install these packages via the package manager, e.g. on ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install tcl-dev tk-dev

Usage

Listing the contents (solids) of a STEP file:

STEPToPoints -c -i <step file>

Generating point clouds for selected solids of the file:

STEPToPoints -i <step file> -o <output file> -g <sampling distance> -s <solid1>,<solid2>,<...>`

Note that the selection of solids can be done by name or index (comma separated list, index starts with 1). For the indices, the range is also supported, e.g. 1-3 for the first three solids.

Following the help text from the command line:

STEPToPoints.exe
STEP to point cloud conversion by regular sampling
Usage:
  STEPToPoints [OPTION...]

  -i, --in arg        Input file
  -o, --out arg       Output file (.obj, .ply, .xyz)
  -c, --content       List content (solids)
  -s, --select arg    Select solids by name or index (comma separated list, index starts with 1). For the indices, the range is also supported, e.g. `1-3` for the first three solids.
  -g, --sampling arg  Sampling distance
  -b, --binary        Write binary file (only for .ply files)
  -h, --help          Print usage

Note

As output file, xyz, obj, and ply files are supported.

Examples

Examples are from the examples directory.

Example Basic Shapes

Solids

Point cloud with normal vectors
STEPToPoints.exe -i basic_shapes.stp -o out.xyz -g 0.5

Remarks

This code has been tested with an OpenCASCADE 7.5.0 prebuilt binary (opencascade-7.5.0-vc14-64.exe) on Windows, as well as OpenCASCADE system packages on openSUSE Linux. With changes in the configuration section in the CMakeLists.txt file the build should also work with other OpenCASCADE versions.