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Comment by 15155 | original | OpenSCAD the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller
[−]15155 · 2026-10-10 Sat 21:30 UTC · link
[−]YuechenLi · 2026-10-10 Sat 22:29 UTC · link
STEP is a weird standard and one of the reasons it's weird is because it allows you to store tessellated mesh in the file with no BREP. Wrapping an STL mesh inside a STEP container is trivial, but reconstructing a BREP from the mesh is daunting.

Here're are some SIGGRAPH 2026 papers attempting BREP recovery, if you are interested. None of their automated approaches seem to work reliably, and they can only recover generic NURBS instead of analytical geometries like circles/cones/torii, etc.

https://github.com/AutodeskAILab/DualBrep https://github.com/yilinliu77/Brepler https://rilpraa0110.github.io/Img2CADSeq/

[−]15155 · 2026-10-10 Sat 22:30 UTC · link
Yeah - this is BREP-recovery using RANSAC shapes, not tesselated-mesh-in-STEP.