This is a simple command-line utility to convert 3d ".3mf" files to the ".stl" files used by most 3d printer slicing software.

You will need a working c++ development environment to make this code. You must also install a zip development library, usually available from your repository. For Debian users, that's the "libzip-dev" package. If you wish to use this program successfully, you'll also need the "p7zip" or "p7zip-full" package in order to work around a current bug in the way the Debian zip libraries handle ".3mf" files.

Unzip the source code to an empty directory and type "make". It compiles without errors or warnings on Debian 3.2 ("Sarge") and Debian 8.0 ("Jessie"). This will produce an executable called "3mf2stl".

The current version of the Debian zip libraries won't decompress ".3mf" files, apparently because of a file format dispute between the 3mf folks and the Debian folks. The symptom of this Trouble is the following error message:

Error on [Lion_Cookie_Cutter.3mf] : Multi-disk zip archives not supported

The current work-around is to unzip the .3mf file with p7zip, then re-zip it with the same utility. That produces a zip archive which the Linux zip libraries handle properly. The "convert_to_stl.sh" script automates this process, albeit with minimal error handling. If you type "make test" at the command line, make(1) will run the convert_to_stl.sh script to produce "Lion_Cookie_Cutter.stl". You should be able to import this stl file into the 3d software of your choice and see a funny cookie cutter thing.

This program has a usage message with more details on how to use it. You can see the usage message and version number by typing its name at the command line.

This code is based on the work of Shawn Haylaka, which was released to the public domain.

This code is Copyright(c) Charles Shapiro and Shawn Haylaka, October 2016.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

The "tinyxml2.cpp" and "tinyxml2.h" files used in this program were written by Lee Thomason; they have their own licenses which are in the referenced source files.

Charles Shapiro [email protected]