MachineWorks Ltd is pleased to announce the release of Polygonica, Version 1.1.
Large Solid Support
Polygonica has always been able to process large models very quickly but the latest version includes automatic simplification for out-of-core solids. This enables Polygonica's powerful algorithms, including Boolean operations, solid healing, offsetting, and slicing, to be performed on arbitrarily sized meshes.
The threshold for simplification is by default 6 million triangles, although this can be changed by the user, and MachineWorks has successfully processed STL files of over 40GB. The maximum size of the mesh is limited only by available disk space, and does not impact the performance or stability of the process.
Support for Colours
The STL file format is the de-facto standard in Additive Manufacturing, but has well known limitations, particularly when it comes to colour. The new release of Polygonica has support for arbitrary data defined on the mesh which can be used to represent colour as well as other data. This means that colour and other data is preserved during complex healing operations, such as closing the model, removing self-intersections, non-manifold edges, and noise shells.
For 3D Printing, this means that Polygonica can process other file formats such as AMF, OBJ, 3DS and many more. As well as healing, meshes can be sliced at any resolution into both vector and image based slice formats.
Improved Healing & Boolean Algorithms
At the core of Polygonica are unique geometrical algorithms that have been in continuous development for 20 years. MachineWorks continues to develop and enhance these algorithms to meet the requirements of customers. The new release of Polygonica extends the reach of the automatic healing capabilities to even the most demanding of meshes, whilst improving the speed and robustness.
"The new release of Polygonica represents a leap forward in solid modelling" said Dr David Knight, Polygonica Sales Manager. "The ability to heal and slice colour meshes is important in the 3D Printing industry, where full colour printing is becoming more commonplace. Additionally, preserving arbitrary data on meshes, as well as handling very large models, is important for other industries such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD, Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Reverse Engineering".
