MachineWorks Ltd, a provider of CNC Simulation, verification and polygonal mesh processing software, will be at the AMUG Expo in the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville, Florida, from April 19 to 23 to demonstrate the Polygonica software toolkit for 3D Printing.
The Additive Manufacturing Users Group meetings began back in the early 1990s, so they've had some time to grow into a substantial forum for educating, discussing and advancing the use of additive manufacturing technologies. This will be the second consecutive year that Polygonica will be exhibiting at this year's meeting.
There are some new features of Polygonica aimed which seem pretty interesting. This includes Polygonica's full color mesh healing and slicing capabilities. 3D printers are printing in more and more colors and materials, so this feature fits the current zeitgeist.
By fully healing meshes, Polygonica performs the action of closing open edges and holes. It also removes self-intersections and non-manifold edges, carefully interpolating color information. This includes face and vertex colors as well as multiple texture maps. The meshes are sliced and sent to the printer, which isn't that big of a deal. But in most cases, the 3D printer requires the slice to be defined as a thick colored band or ribbon and Polygonica's profile offsetting does the work to meet that internal requirement.
Ensuring the printability of models can be challenging when it comes to especially thin geometry, which can break or warp during or after printing. 3D printing software is often designed to perform ray-tracing to determine the thickness of the model, and Polygonica is no exception. But this approach can also lead to false positives.
By performing a detailed mesh analysis based on a double offset of the mesh, then following that operation by performing a comparison between the original and offset mesh, Polygonica is adding an extra layer of preparation for 3D models in addition to its existing mesh analysis features, i.e., interference checking and the calculation of the optimal rotation of a mesh on the print bed. This extra optimization is designed to overcome the probability of a false positive.
Dr David Knight, Polygonica Sales Manager at MachineWorks, said, "These features provide a rigorous approach to optimizing the Additive Manufacturing workflow. Polygonica now provides an extensive set of complex algorithms to help prepare models for printing in addition to its powerful automatic mesh healing engine."
The Polygonica Toolkit provides polygon modelling component software for CAD/CAM/CAE, reverse engineering, rapid prototyping, 3D printing, 3D movies and gaming, GIS and mining, urban modelling and other 3D digital applications.
If you find yourself at the AMUG Expo, you can go to Stand 19 from April 19-23rd at the Hyatt Regency in Jacksonville Florida and check out Polygonica and MachineWorks in person. They haven't released the cost of the software, but if you are interested in testing it out, click here.