Simplify round faces
Fewer facets on the cylinders, cones, spheres and tori of a part from a STEP, as coarse as a deviation allows. The flat faces follow at the rims, and the part keeps its CAD faces.
A CAD file is cut into triangles fine enough for the workshop, and most of those triangles are on the round faces: fillets, bores, shafts, every cylinder and torus. For a picture on the web they can be far coarser. This tool takes points out of the round faces until the facets are as coarse as the deviation allows. A point on the rim between a wall and its cap goes from both at once, so the cap loses it too and no crack opens.
It needs the CAD faces, so it works on a part from a STEP file opened with them (see CAD faces and edges), or from a scene saved from one. Unlike most edits, the part keeps its CAD faces afterwards: the faces are the same, only cut coarser, so Remove holes, Untriangulate and Remove fillets and chamfers still know them.
How to use it
- Select the parts, or select nothing for every part that is shown, and run Simplify round faces from the command search (Ctrl + K).
- Deviation up to is how far the surface may move from the true round face, as a share of the part's size. Looser means fewer facets. The card says how many points went and how many triangles are left.
- Segments per turn, at least keeps a full turn from getting coarser than this many facets, however loose the deviation. A bore of 12 facets still reads as round.
- One undo step (Ctrl + Z) brings the part back. The flat faces are not touched: Untriangulate is the tool for those.