For quite a few years now I have dabbled with model railways. Although I am nowhere near some of the fantastic layouts with scenery you can find in dedicated magazines and on the web, I enjoy the occasional muckin’ about with creating buildings and learning the potential of electronics to control things via Arduino components and programming.
Many of the buildings I have were printed on one of my 3D printers after being downloaded from sites such as Thingiverse, while others I have created from scratch with Maxon’s Cinema 4D, a modelling and animation program for both Mac and PC I have championed for nearly 25 years now!
But one thing has always escaped me, and that is how to modify an object from Thingiverse if all you have is the STL file that is used to create the printable version.
I recently did some research on this; how to modify an STL file in Cinema 4D effectively, and there were quite a lot of technical details that were outside my knowledge.
Until I came across one more. And this is why this is possibly the world’s shortest tutorial.
Here’s how to do it.
In Cinema 4D, open the STL file with the standard File Open Project option, change the defaults in the dialogue box that opens (presets and scale) and click OK Next, select the object in the Object Manager, press “C” (for make editable) and then select your choice of point, edge or polygon editing modes.
That’s it. You can now edit to your heart’s content with all the tools available.
Effectively, it appears that Maxon snuck in the ability to edit STL files when I wasn’t looking.
So Bravo Maxon!