Access to OpenCascade STL mesh

Hello GMSH-Team,

we are trying to generate a preview/visualisation surface alongside the 3D mesh for complex curved parts. Generating the 3D mesh works really well but it takes time (obviously) and is inefficient for 3D rendering. What we need is a mesh that represents the surface of the part with a somewhat minimal number of elements. I understand that the OpenCascade STL mesh fulfills our requirement but it is not accessible as a standard Mesh in the mesh module as far as I know.

What we tried:

• open the step, mark boundary parts, save without meshing as STL -> stores boundary information if "Mesh.StlOneSolidPerSurface" is set and ascii format is selected, nothing/only the nodes are stored in binary format
• any other export format stores empty meshes
• generating 2D surface meshes in GMSH only allows for high quality compute meshes (I know this is the goal of gmsh ;))

So the question is: Is there any way to create a mesh in the GMSH mesh module that uses the OCC STL mesh representation and can receive the physical groups information from the geometry?

Thanks a lot in advance, Johannes