Quote Originally Posted by phill05 View Post
Nick I don't want to high-jack Reefy's thread but looks like we are both thinking along the same lines here, what would you say would be the best format to use to produce either a hand or in my case a car if not an stl.

Phill
Phill,
You could process an stl to reduce the polygon count, meshes lend themselves well to complex shapes but if you have fine detail in a mesh model you have a huge number of small flat surface elements which will break CNC tool paths into hundreds of thousands of short straight moves.
Ideally you should work in the native format of the CAD system you use, then your CAM can use curves, I use Bob-CAD/CAM V25 so anything I want to share is usually exported as both .step and .iges and the recipient uses which suits them best, I only use the stl format for exporting parts for 3D printing.
Regards,
Nick