Having trouble importing STL files into Blender? Then you’ve come to the right place.
Just follow these 5 easy steps to import your files with ease and align your files to let you work with them.
- Import from file menu
- Align to Blender coordinate system
- Scale to correct size
If you work in digital art and asset creation, then you will have to get used to working with different file types.
One of the common file types is an STL file (Standard Tessellation Language or STereoLithography).
If you work with scanning equipment or 3D printing then you should be familiar with STL files.
Maybe you have an asset stored as an STL files and you want to get them into Blender in order to use them in 3D art work.
Follow the steps below for importing STL files into Blender or scroll to the bottom of the post for a video on these steps.
1. Importing STL files into Blender from the file menu
To import an STL file simply go to the File Menu in Blender.
Scroll down until you see the ‘Import’ option.
Click on the Import option and navigate to your STL file in your computer folders.
Select the object that you want to import and then hit the button that says ‘import STL’.
For this example, I will be importing an STL file of a rocket that was generated by a 3D scanner.
Once you’ve imported your STL file into Blender you may not see anything happen.
If you look at my viewport below, you will not see the Rocket that I have imported.
You might think that the import hasn’t worked.
However, if you look closely at the outliner area at the top right of the screen, you will see a data object called ‘Rocket’.
The import worked. So what’s going on?
We have imported the STL file in from another program with a different coordinate system.
This means that the object can be mis-aligned from Blender’s coordinate system.
We need to fix this and will look at this in the next section.
2. Align your STL file to Blender Coordinate system
If you have imported an STL file and you don’t see your model in the Blender viewport then there are a few things to do.
Firstly, check that the model has shown up in the outliner.
Then you need to adjust the model so you can see it in your viewport.
To do this, when you are in Blender with the viewport open, just hit 7 on your keypad. This will set your viewport to ‘top view’.
If you scroll out whilst in top view, you may find that the model is located far out of the viewport.
See the image below for how far out of the viewport my model was imported. That tiny orange speck at the bottom of the image is the default cube.
Another trick is to hit ‘1’ on your keypad to get the front view.
Again, scrolling out will help you see if the model has been imported far outside the standards viewport view.
Once you have found the model, press ‘G’ and use your mouse to drag the model to a better position within the viewport.
I usually try to bring the model back to the origin of the coordinate system (0,0,0).
Then I can do orient the model after that and position it to fit the scene I am working on.
Don’t forget to use the rotate tool to get your model into the right alignment.
You will notice that in the image above, my imported rocket looks huge.
That’s because we need to fix the scale of the imported STL data. And we’ll do that next.
3. Scale to the correct size
Once you have your model in the correct orientation, then you may need to fix the scale of your model.
If you hit ‘N’ whilst in the viewport, it will bring up the sidebar.
If this sidebar you can see the dimensions of your imported object, see below for size of my imported rocket!
As you can see my rocket is currently 149m high. Which is bigger than the Saturn V (the tallest rocket ever made) by 40m!
And I can assure you that I don’t remember scanning a rocket that big.
Obviously there is a scaling issue.
The rocket should be 14.9cm tall, its registering as 149m. The scaling is out by a factor of 1000.
This tells me that the STL was exported in mm, i.e. 149mm and the default unit set in Blender is metres.
So to fix our scaling issue, we need to divide each of our three dimensions by 1000.
And so in the x,y,z scale box, I will enter a factor of 0.001. This is the same as dividing the current dimensions by 1000.
You can see in the image below the difference that makes. The object in Blender is now the size that it was scanned at in real life.
Of course, you don’t have to take things back to their original scale. Absolutely not.
You might want a giant rocket in your scene!
In which case, leave the scale alone, or make it bigger should you need to.
That’s the beauty of blender. You make the rules of your art.
If you’re looking for the video on how to import an STL, here it is:
So I hope that this helped you with importing STL files into Blender.
See our other posts for tutorials on how to work with STL mesh data once you’ve imported it.
If you found value in this, please share and help someone else on their blender journey.