Script that helps to convert 3D models in .step format to .dae format using FreeCAD and Meshlab
I wrote this program because I wanted to use .step 3D models in Google Sketchup. The way I found was to convert to binary stl format using FreeCAD and then to Collada (DAE) with Meshlab. This program is just a Python script that makes this process automatic.
You can find them all in Ubuntu's repositories, I'm sure they are present in other distributions' repositories as well.
There are two ways of using this script.
To convert all step files in current directory use
$ step-to-dae
To convert a single step file (foo.step) use
$ step-to-dae foo.step
All processed step files are stored in a folder called "done_step" nested in the current directory
The script is not able to process ~30% of tested step files. The program fails during the conversion of the step file into a binary stl with FreeCAD. In some cases it hangs and in some others it breaks while using nearly all RAM.
SOME of this step files have a large amount of shapes and manually removing some of these shapes with FreeCAD makes the file convertible.
Anyway, I know that it's not an issue of the script itself, because the same thing happens if I try to convert the file manually (using FreeCAD's GUI) but I'm not an expert so there's a chance that some of this bugs could be fixed. Please contact me if you know how.