At the recent RAPID + TCT event, Belgium-based Materialise introduced new tools to address limitations that might be holding the additive manufacturing (AM) industry back from being a primary manufacturing solution rather than just a mere prototyping vehicle. Materialise envisions these tools as allowing AM to be more reproducible and scalable.

The company has introduced two new offerings toward the aforementioned goal. The first, CO-AM, is a platform that covers the whole AM workflow to ensure that all steps are consistent with each other—from quoting to ordering, building, and post-processing. The second is Magics 26, a software that simplifies and adds functionality to the 3D printing design and editing process.

CO-AM Platform for Serial Production

CO-AM functionality. (Source: Materialise.)

Although well known for its 3D printing software, Materialise wanted to go beyond tools to facilitate the building process and instead address challenges throughout the AM process. As a result, the company designed the platform to grant manufacturers cloud-based access to software solutions during all stages of their operations in the hope of propelling AM into the arena where it can be suitable for serial manufacturing and mass personalization.

CO-AM covers production requests, instant ordering and quoting, production planning, data preparation and serialization, build processing and printing, post-processing and, finally, order fulfillment. It basically serves as a one-stop, comprehensive place for the entire AM ecosystem.

It’s an open architecture framework that permits customers from industries like aerospace, automotive, consumer, medical and energy to integrate tools of their choice while also providing options to scale as needed. Additionally, CO-AM reportedly allows access to production data for continuous monitoring of AM workflows.

Materialise senior director of marketing Hans Van Glabeke explained that CO-AM is a full storefront environment where users have access to a whole suite of products, including the Magics line of software for design and building as well as tools for post-processing stages and even tracking the shipping status for items heading to clients. A key step in developing CO-AM was Materialise’s 2021 acquisition of Link3D to integrate its cloud-based SaaS applications and span the entire workflow from order intake to delivery.

Additionally, the company partnered with CASTOR 3D to harness its algorithms and help match various 3D printing products on the market to jobs where they’ll perform the best.

“This open platform will allow the AM community to co-develop solutions that create competitive advantages for individual companies and empower entire industries,” said Bart Van der Schueren, Materialise CTO. “At the same time, this business model generates new revenue streams for hardware and software partners.”

CO-AM consists of a data lake that can connect all production used throughout the AM process and keep track of what’s occurring in production. The platform is also equipped with an AI that can analyze production data and learn ways to make improvements.

The platform could help overcome a key stumbling block for AM: scalability. It’s positioned to do this by providing an open ecosystem that connects and integrates different technologies that customers already use in their production infrastructure. CO-AM will also offer over 25 software apps that can integrate with the Magics line for design, as well as AM Watch for production data collection and Build Processors that can connect with more than 150 different 3D printing systems.

Additionally, the platform will be compatible with independent software vendors, including AM-Flow and CASTOR.

“There are many digital dots to connect to create a full automation value chain,” said Stefan Rink, AM-Flow CEO. “Teaming up with other solution providers of this chain is a prerequisite for the growth and scalability of additive manufacturing production.”

Magics 26: CAD and Mesh Integrated

Magics 26 in product edit mode. (Source: Materialise.)

The latest Magics iteration—Magics 26—is geared toward solving a common issue in the 3D printing world. Although 3D printing requires design files to be fed into printers, the files aren’t always compatible, and editing often requires returning to the drawing board.

Materialise tends to gravitate toward food metaphors to describe its latest software tool’s potential. According to Egwin Bovyn, product line manager for Materialise, CAD and mesh are like peanut butter and jelly. They’re great on their own but even better together. Magics 26 integrates CAD and mesh design approaches to improve workflow and make design changes easy to execute anywhere in the process.

Those in the 3D printing industry know that mesh and CAD each have their strengths and weaknesses. While CAD can yield better resolution for editing parts, mesh offers consistency that helps with compatibility across 3D printing equipment. That’s why designers often use both. Yet, not all 3D printing software allows easy integration of both tools. Materialise hopes to overcome that limitation with Magics 26.

“Some actions in CAD are faster than mesh files,” said Van Glabeke. “Mesh files have a tendency to be a lot bigger than a CAD file, which makes changing things in design, doing rotations, and so on in CAD a lot faster. But mesh still has a lot of benefits we don’t want to throw away. So, we’re going for a hybrid engine inside with both the CAD engine and the mesh engine. It’s the best of CAD and mesh.”

The software also allows customers to backtrack in the design process and make modifications when and where desired. In another analogy, this is akin to making soup. In previous versions of Magics, you put vegetables in, and soup came out. But if you wanted to get the vegetables back in their original state, you couldn’t. Now, with Magics 26’s Boundary Representation Format, users can go backward and forward in the design-build process without having to start from scratch.

“With Magics 26, I could easily make modifications on CAD models without having to go back to a CAD design software,” said Astrid Dejose, additive manufacturing designer at Sirris. “It is so much more efficient staying in Magics 26 and not having to switch applications.”

According to Van Glabeke, previous iterations of Magics were integral to making 3D printing work productively. However, given the expansion of the 3D printing industry and the influx of many different machines, a sustainable ecosystem that ensures compatibility is necessary so customers can improve their process.

For example, Materialise has a Polish production plant that makes about 300,000 eyeglasses annually, and the company would like to scale to one million per year. The challenge is that each set of eyewear needs to be produced in the color that a customer requests, and so each printed item needs to produce the desired outcome and reflect the correct color with no unwanted variations. Although more printers could add volume, it doesn’t solve the issues that could arise in production—such as a customer receiving eyeglasses in the wrong shade of blue. For that reason, Materialise’s CO-AM platform yields greater intelligence about what’s happening throughout the product production process. Meanwhile, Magics 26 is geared to allow engineers to make changes quickly and easily without having to alter entire designs.

In particular, Magics 26 comes with new features to make the process easier, such as a toolbar of support services that allow for manual changes to even the smallest of design aspects in an accurate and flexible way. Additionally, the software prioritizes data integrity for parts to minimize errors.