SHM STL Tools FAQ Your version of Lightwave must support Lscript for this plugin to function.
Q. The Importer doesn't work on a Mac with the latest versio (2.6.1) of LScript. What's the deal? A. Sorry about that. There's a bug in the latest version of LScript on the Mac that I have no work-around for. If you really need the Import function, I suggest reverting to 2.5.1 until the next release, which I hope will address that problem. Mac problems are tricky, as I have no Mac with which to test the scripts.. Q. What are STL files, and why do I need them? A. If you don't know what STL files are, odds are you don't need them. They are the de-facto standard file format for 3D stereo Lithography, also know as 3D printing. Q. What is the Byte Order selector for on the file requestor? A. If you use Lightwave on a PC, odds are you will never have to switch it off the Intel setting. Mac users may have to play with byte-order to read some STL file. In short, mac and Intel machines store binary numbers differently, which can cause trouble. When exporting, you should set it to Intel. If your printer can't read the file, then try Mac. If you can't read a file on the mac, try setting it to Mac byte order. It all depends what program wrote the file. These settings only apply when loading and saving binary files. Q. I'm trying to read an ASCII file on the Mac, and it doesn't work. What's up? A. That's because the Mac thinks different about how to store ASCII files. If you want to use ASCII import on the Mac, the file must be saved with Line Feed (LF) only. If it is saved with Carriage Return / Line Feed (CR/LF) it will fail. Q. What is a Carriage, and why would one Return it? A. Back in the ancient days, people accessed computers on terminals that were essentially glorified electric typewriters. Typewriters were mechanical systems for putting words to paper. In this quaint system, there were tiny "hammers" with letters on them, that would strike a cloth ribbon soaked in pigs blood (or sometimes ink). This impact would imprint the letter on the page. But there had to be hammers for every letter and number, all punctuation. A lot of hammers! So, the hammers couldn't really move around. The solution was was to wrap the paper around a cylinder, attached to a mobile platform, or carriage. This carriage would move right-to-left each time a hammer finished typing a letter, to make space for the next letter. Once it reached the edge of the page, the user would have to trigger a mechanical release to return the carriage to the other edge of the page. Thus, carriage return! And then, as a tribute to their pagan gods, the designers of the Macintosh decided to somehow graft this ancient ritual to the writing of ones and zeros to magnetic media. Q. Do people really ask these questions, or do you just make them? A. That's an excellent and insightful question. Most of them are in response to feedback from users, but I kind of recompose them on the fly, so I guess you could say that I make them up. |