MachineWorks Ltd, will be demonstrating the Polygonica software toolkit for 3D Printing at the AMUG Expo in the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville, Florida, from April 19 to 23.
The annual meeting of the Additive Manufacturing Users Group dates back to the early 1990s and has grown to become the leading forum for educating and advancing the uses and applications of additive manufacturing technologies. The Polygonica team will be exhibiting for the second year running.
In particular, we will be demonstrating some of the new features of Polygonica aimed at the next generation of 3D printing technology. This includes Polygonica's unique full colour mesh healing and slicing capabilities. As more companies announce full colour printers, it is vital that software products keep pace with hardware development.
Polygonica can fully heal meshes - closing open edges and holes and removing self-intersections and non-manifold edges - whilst maintaining and carefully interpolating colour information. This can include face and vertex colours, or multiple texture maps. The meshes can then be sliced ready to be sent to the printer. In many cases, the printer requires the slice to be defined as a thick coloured band or ribbon and Polygonica's profile offsetting takes care of that.
Another development is a different approach to the problem of ensuring the printability of models. Some printing technologies may have problems with very thin geometry, which could break or deform during or after printing. A common approach to determining the location of such geometries is to perform ray-tracing to determine the thickness of the model, and Polygonica has provided this facility since the first release. But such a brute force approach can often lead to false positives.
A new approach can check for thin and problematic areas of a model by performing a detailed mesh analysis based on a double offset of the mesh, followed by a comparison between the original and offset mesh. This is in addition to existing mesh analysis features such as interference checking and the calculation of the optimal rotation of a mesh on the print bed.
"These features provide a rigorous approach to optimising the Additive Manufacturing workflow", said Dr David Knight, Polygonica Sales Manager at MachineWorks. "Polygonica now provides an extensive set of complex algorithms to help prepare models for printing in addition to its powerful automatic mesh healing engine."
