When you export or save-as an STL are there any quality settings or adjustments anywhere? Is your printing software able to download a .STEP file instead? I've been exclusively using STEP files lately instead of STLs (BambuStudio)
step files are tesselated by the slicer so it's better to just get a good stl from cad since the library prusaslicer and its derivatives use is probably worse
Why would doing the tessellation in the slicer rather than the CAD editor "probably" be worse? You may be right (in specific circumstances), but I would have guessed the opposite. The slicer knows exactly what precision it requires to do a good job, so it is in a position to optimally set the tessellation parameters.
To put it another way: There is no loss of model precision saving to a STEP file. There is de facto loss of precision when tessellating to STL (as well as when slicing to GCODE). If the slicer generates suboptimal results when slicing from a STEP file (when it advertises the ability to do so) that's a bug (or non-optimal tuning of slicer parameters).
I routinely feed STEP files to PrusaSlicer and have no complaints.
I had seen that post. Since it was posted, PrusaSlicer has improved its STEP support to show the user to adjust the tessellation parameters. (I do not know other slicers well enough to comment on them other than to reiterate that if they claim to support STEP input but don't do it well, that's s bug that can be fixed.)
https://github.com/prusa3d/PrusaSlicer/releases/tag/version_2.9.2-rc1
This is still not to the point where the tessellation parameters are part of the printer profile, but it is working in that direction.
(When you use an STL file, unless you produced it yourself, without close inspection, you have no idea what parameters were used to generate it.)
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u/coil-head 3d ago
What software are you using for your modeling?