Sunsetting OBJ & STL file import support from open-source Speckle

Making Speckle
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Speckle’s file importer allows you to drag files in to your browser window and have the 3D model appear in Speckle. This enables the magic of Speckle without having to install any additional software on your desktop.

In July we announced major improvements to the file importer for Speckle, greatly improving the experience when importing IFC files. These improvements are available both on https://app.speckle.systems and the open source version of Speckle.

As well as IFC, we have historically supported importing two other types of file in the open source version of Speckle; these are OBJ and STL files. Through data and feedback collected over the past few years it appears that these file types are very rarely used. We would like to continue providing the best experience on Speckle and need to weigh up the time and effort required to improve various features with the benefit we collectively get from them.

Our plan is, in time (exact date to be determined), to ‘sunset’ the OBJ and STL file importers from open source Speckle. This would only affect the ability to upload those types of files via the browser.

It will still be possible to upload OBJ and STL data to Speckle. This can be achieved by importing OBJ and STL files in to a desktop application that supports those file types, such as Blender, Rhino, or Sketchup. Using a Speckle integration, you can import the files in to the desktop application and simply send the data to Speckle.

Speckle will continue to support OBJ and STL file imports on https://app.speckle.systems. This is possible as app.speckle.systems uses a different technical mechanism for file imports from the open source Speckle. Due to commercial licensing with third parties we are unable to offer this mechanism in the open source version of Speckle. This mechanism allows us to offer significantly more types of file on https://app.speckle.systems, you can read more about this on our blog.

If you are using the STL or OBJ file importers of the open source version of Speckle, please let us know in the discussion below.

The Speckle Team

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With sufficient interest, we can publish at a later time how to programmatically upload OBJ and STL files using a local script.

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Hi @iainsproat

We are currently not using the file importers on our hosted open source version of Speckle, but we intend to include that once we do switch to v3.
We are mostly interested in the STEP file importer.
Will it be possible to get some insights on how you achieved that or will it be completely closed source?

Davide

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It will have to be closed-source because we are using a proprietary stack for all file uploads, except IFC. So we can’t package that.

It varies by file type, but I believe STEP uses Rhino Inside/Compute.

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