SolidModelBrowser - convenient viewing of STL, 3MF, OBJ, especially for those who have a 3D printer

This story began when I bought a 3D printer several years ago. Of course, at first I didn’t really understand how this technology worked, and how durable and useful his plastic sculptures would be. However, having quickly trained and adjusted this machine, I was surprised and quite satisfied with the quality of the plastic products, the soldering of the layers and the accuracy of their geometric dimensions. Of course, later there were some upgrades to the device, but that’s not the point now.

Of course, I quickly got tired of printing toys from thingiverse, and I took my drygo table with a big focus on technical equipment. The printer soon became one of my favorite toys, and the Blender+Cura combination made it possible to sculpt models of small parts, sometimes in a matter of minutes, and then send them for printing. The wheel on the sofa has broken – there’s no need to run to the store, some fastening or bracket has broken off – and the hotend fan is already humming. Pins, thrust bearings, elements of mechanisms, and of course, a bunch of all sorts of jars and boxes…

The STL and 3MF library grew. And at some point it became clear that I did not remember in which file this or that part was located. Although the files had meaningful names in English, I simply forgot what I called them and how, and it became increasingly difficult to navigate the growing dump. We needed some kind of convenient viewer. This is how the Solid Model Browser project was born several years ago.

The application is built on the WPF platform and runs on Windows. The window displays the loaded model, a toolbar-buttons, and a file panel on the left, changing its transparency as it is needed.

Moving through the list of files and directories, with the mouse or cursor keys, we immediately see the selected model, which is more convenient than opening each one in a slicer or editor, just to remember what kind of model it is, or what version of the model it is.

The camera is controlled by the mouse – that is, it rotates and moves in the space around the model.

I haven’t made any settings menu yet, so all settings are set in the settings.ini file. This file will appear after the first launch of the program. You can also open this file by clicking the wrench button – the file will open in the application associated with this file type in the system.

The application can

Open STL, 3MF, OBJ files for viewing. Supports binary and text STL formats, decoding of the main model from 3MF, partial support for OBJ (triangle meshes only).

Save the current view of the model from the camera with a given resolution (SaveImageDPI setting)
Send a file to another local application (ExternalApp and ExternalAppArguments settings) so that you can quickly open the current file in a slicer or editor.
Rotate the model 90 degrees on all axes
Include diffuse scattering, reflective, emissive and diffuse materials for the interior wall. Adjust the colors of materials (DiffuseColor, SpecularColor, EmissiveColor, BackDiffuseColor settings). By customizing materials, you can not only change their colors, but also their transparency.
Switch camera modes – perspective and orthogonal. Change the viewing angle to achieve a wide-angle view, such as a fish-eye effect.
Show XYZ axes
Fix problems with normals and direction of polygon vertices (only when viewing, without touching the source file)
Show information about the model, the total number of vertices, polygons and normals, dimensions and coordinates of the center of the model

The application also has a light theme, which can be switched with a button with a sun next to the window control buttons.

The correct selection of materials can help you see the model better.

Here the main diffuse surface material is disabled, but the diffuse material of the inner sides of the model walls is enabled

You can not only turn materials on and off, but also adjust their colors and transparency in the settings file. For example like this:

another color option for the main three materials

Application settings

Target platform .NET Framework 4.8, WPF (Windows 7 … Windows 11)
The size of the v0.1 distribution is about 100 KB
No installation required, copy the executable file to any empty folder.
The “default” settings file is created in the program folder after the first launch.

Setting up model loading in another application

The “Open with other application” button with an up arrow allows you to launch another application by passing a parameter to it. To do this, you need to set two parameters in the settings, for example like this:

Then, when you press the button, the slicer with our model will be launched. The $file$ variable is replaced with the full path of the currently viewed model file.

Github

You can download the source code or the latest build on GitHub.

I hope that Solid Model Browser will also help some of the readers to better navigate the local library of 3D models and send them for printing. Good luck!