3D geometric morphometrics now accepts STL files

6th June 2016 by PhyloNimbus

I'm happy to announce that you can now upload STL meshes to 3D projects in the morphometrics app.

The other accepted format for 3D meshes is PLY. Both file formats work equally well in binary or ascii encoding. However, binary meshes take up a lot less space - so if you're running out of free space on the PhyloNimbus server, you might find it worthwhile to convert future meshes to binary files.

How can you tell if a mesh is saved in a binary format?

Just try opening it up in a text editor (e.g. Notepad). If you see rows of numbers, then you have an ASCII file. But if you get lines of gobbledegook and strange characters, then you've got a binary file.

Happy landmark digitizing!

P.S. Meshlab is a free program that will convert meshes between ASCII and binary.

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