
All STL coordinates were required to be positive numbers in the original specification, but this restriction is no longer enforced, and negative coordinates are commonly encountered in STL files today. To facilitate the adoption, 3MF Consortium has also published a C++ implementation of the 3MF file format.Īn STL file describes a raw, unstructured triangulated surface by the unit normal and vertices (ordered by the right-hand rule) of the triangles using a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system. In addition, other key players in the 3D printing and additive manufacturing business, such as Materialise, 3D Systems, Siemens PLM Software, and Stratasys, have recently joined the consortium. Other firms in the 3MF Consortium are Microsoft, SLM, and HP, while Shapeways are also included to give insight from a 3D Printing background. Today, CAD software-related companies such as Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes, and Netfabb are part of the 3MF Consortium. Binary files are more common since they are more compact. The STL format specifies both ASCII and binary representations. STL files describe only the surface geometry of a three-dimensional object without representing color, texture, or other common CAD model attributes. It is widely used for rapid prototyping, 3D printing, and computer-aided manufacturing. Many other software packages support this file format.

STL is a file format native to the stereolithography CAD software created by 3D Systems. 3MF is an XML-based data format designed for using additive manufacturing, including information about materials, colors, and other information that cannot be represented in the STL format.

Model/stl, model/x.stl-ascii, model/x.stl-binaryģD Manufacturing Format or 3MF is an open-source file format standard developed and published by the 3MF Consortium.

Application/vnd.ms-package.3dmanufacturing-3dmodel+xml, application/+xml, model/3mf
