Hi, Does anyone know how to export an OBJ to STL within blender without getting a polygonal surface?
See attached reference image. Any help would be most appreciated.
Luke
My thoughts on first looking at this is that the obj file has smoothing enabled while the STL version doesn’t. The “texture” you speak of are the seams of the polys. In the viewport, right click and select, “Shade smooth”.
Other than that, a subd modifier will increase the poly count and smoothness. Overkill, I would bet.
As far as I know stl does not support smoothing so what you are trying is impossible.
Great point.
For his visual gratification, it would help.
On the printing side, adding the subd modifier and applying it would help if there are truly missing parts of the model.
It would also help the print; although it is not smoothing, programmatically, it does when being printed. That is to say, it will print less tessellated.
Smooth shading works fine for visualising, yet subd didn’t have any effect.
As an exporting comparison, I tried converting OBJ to STL using free online converters but this resulted with the same polygonal surface. There must be an easy way to do it 
Ah, you used a subdivision modifier to smooth the mesh itself.
In that case the problem is clear:
As can be seen in the image you posted you do not have “Apply Modifiers” ticked in the stl export dialogue.
STL is a triangle mesh format with no normal data…