Open an STL file in your browser

Open it#

1. Drop the STL on the box above, or open schmelze and press Import. You can also drag the file onto schmelze's 3D view.
2. The model appears centred over the print bed, with its triangle count in the corner. If it floats or sinks, Drop to bed in the Object tab puts it flat on the bed.
3. Drag to turn the view, drag with the right mouse button to move it, scroll to zoom. The T, F and R buttons at the top right show it from the top, the front and the right.

Both kinds of STL open: binary, which most programs write, and ASCII, the text form that some programs such as OpenSCAD write. The file is read by the page and never uploaded.

Measure it#

Select the model and open the Object tab. It shows the size in millimetres along each axis, and its position and rotation. STL files carry no unit, so schmelze reads the numbers as millimetres, the way slicers do. If a part comes in 25.4 times too small, it was drawn in inches: scale it by 25.4.

Change it#

• Move, rotate and scale with the handles, or type exact values in the Object tab.
• Mirror along any axis, or place the part flat on the bed with one click.
• Add boxes, cylinders, tubes, spheres, cones and rings, then cut them out of your model, join them to it or keep only the overlap. That is how you drill a hole, add a tab or cut a part in two.
• Undo goes back step by step.

Save it#

Export writes the whole scene as one file:

So schmelze is also a converter: STL to OBJ, or STL to glTF, with the unit and the up axis each format expects.