ISSN 2079-3537      

 
 
 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
Scientific Visualization
Issue Year: 2017
Quarter: 4
Volume: 9
Number: 5
Pages: 71 - 77
Article Name: VISUALIZING AND SLICING COMPLEX STRUCTURES FOR ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING
Authors: Sylvain Lefebvre (France)
The paper is recommended by program committee of International Conference «Visual Analytics»
Address: Sylvain Lefebvre
sylvain.lefebvre@inria.fr
Inria, France
Abstract: Additive manufacturing enables the fabrication of complex geometries, not only in terms of their overall shape, but also in terms of their internal structures. Microstructures akin to foams can now be embedded into shapes that can be fabricated. These fine scale structures modify the large-scale properties of the shape, for instance making it lighter while preserving sufficient rigidity, or creating porosities enabling fluids to traverse.
Triangle meshes are not well suited for modeling and visualizing such structures. Instead, several approaches have been proposed to model them as implicit solids, described by an indicator function returning 1 when a point lies within the solid and 0 outside. Such representations are very compact in memory, however interactive visualization and efficient processing for fabrication can become difficult. This stems from the fact that to visualize or fabricate the structure, the function must be queried at a high sampling rate. This results in a slow and memory intensive process.
In this paper we discuss our approach for dealing with such complex structures in the context of interactive modeling for additive manufacturing. We describe an algorithm for the progressive rendering of the structures, as well as an efficient slicing procedure for preparing the geometries for fabrication.
Language: English
DOI: http://doi.org/10.26583/sv.9.5.06


Open Article   Download ZIP archive