What is the best way to import 3D data from Pro/E?

[Evan R.]

One of our customers in the area recently posed the following question, which I'd like to in turn pose to the community:

I got [the LabVIEW 3D picture control] to work with the STL file.  The STL file is 138M.  I can't run it on my laptop because labview give me an error for lack of memory.  I got it to run on a top end desktop.  Any ideas on how to get this to run smoother?  Can I translater the STL file in labveiw to something that's less of a memory hog?

[Evan R.]

Here is some food for thought from one of our LabVIEW programmers in the area:

There is an option when saving the ASCII STL of VRML representation of the assembly to decrease the resolution of the STL/VRML.  I originally had STL saved with custom resolution (about midway between fine and coarse--whatever the default was for custom).  Next, I tried saving the image as STL with a coarse resolution--this method decreased the file size in half.

I would imagine there is a similar setting that can be adjusted in ProE when saving files.  Thus, that is my suggestion.  He could save the model with a lower resolution for work from his personal (less-beefy) laptop for development, and he could use the higher resolution model for work on the high-performance system.