How to compute the center of mass of a solid geometry contained in a STEP file?

Question

I want to compute the center of mass of solid objects constructed with a CAD software that are saved with the STEP format.

Has someone experience with this type of files? How can I extract that information? (I'm working with python, but I also know a little bit of C).

Answer 1

Have you looked at FreeCAD or pythonOCC?

Answer 2

You need to compute the volume of the tetrahedra generated between each tessellation triangle and world origin and sum them together. Front facing triangles will generate a positive volume and blackfacing ones a negative one. The summation of these volumes will return the actual solid object volume.

Here is the detailed paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2151237X.2006.10129220