Some more ideas

#1

Hi,

First of all, let me thank you again for your work and your wonderfull software, please don’t sell it to Autodesk or materialise !!! :slight_smile:
I was a magics user, but i think i was able to stop thanks to you and blender’s team .
There are still some features that are missing for me to make your soft the ultimate one for 3d printing, but i understand that some of them are quite difficult to code.

I) the easy ones :slight_smile:

  1. Add a new type of support : the small internal vertical stick.
    It is very difficult to put manually this stick from the existing internal support function.
    In this new kind of support, the user would only have to point the upper touch point. the internal lower point would be on the exact vertical of the upper point.

  2. Allow the user to point all the holes that he wants to put on the model (real boolean holes) and process the holes at the end, skipping the unpossible holes.

  3. Allow the user to select wich parts he wants to exports as stl ( today if i’m not mistaking, you have to unload the parts you don’t want to export)

  4. I’m using the “Shrink wrap” function of formware instead of the “unify” from magics and it works quite well most of the time. Would it just be possible to increase the resolution, even if a warning is needed to say that it will take a very long time and a very large amount of ram ?

  5. For the volume support :
    -stop the volume at 2 mm from the model and put 1mm large vertical sticks spaced 3mm between volume and model to make it possible to remove
    -make the volume 1mm hollow with infill inside and drainage hole at 2mm from the bottom

II) the hard ones :

  1. stitching : when a stl file has very small holes (<1mm), move the points of the triangle to touch the nearest one (and then fill the micro-hole).

  2. cutting with a plane : split the part along xoy or xoz or yoz at a distance defined by user (very usefull when your parts are just a little bit to large for the contruction plate and you want to cut the edge of the raft)

III) only in my dreams : I know these functions seems to not be the main purpose of your software, but they definitely are “killer functions” that avoid you to switch to other ( very expansive) softwares when the problem occurs, and will save A LOT of time for professional users.They may even could be sold in a “pro version” separately.

  1. unify function : removing the inner polygons of an stl file ( the polygons you can’t see from outside)
    It is very usefull when you want to proceed a hollow after.

  2. cut a part following a line that the user can draw

  3. Booleans functions between parts that works with a high number of polygons.
    Mostly substractions with 2 million polygons.
    It is very usefull when you want to proceed a hollow after, and for a lot of other purposes.

  4. support generation that considers weight and suction forces, and never miss an island.

Thanks Again
Pierre

#2

HI Pierre,

Thanks for your intensive feedback. I noticed it was on ‘need approval’ for some reason so i missed it. I will reply now. I’ll put the todo’s on our list.

I) easy ones:

  1. you could use the ‘connector bar’ tool for this in the latest version. It allow you to click ‘object-object’,‘support-support’,‘support-object’.

  2. What would be the benefit? Current approach you see clearly which one fails

  3. No. You can do ‘export selected’.

  4. Yes and no. It scales in 3 directions to that’s very slow fast. Perhaps we should make a ‘experimental’ mode. The question is how to make it ‘fool’ proof as well.
    We’ve build a similar function to convert SLC to Mesh, but it runs in a 2.5D fashion over the SLC file. Perhaps we can first slice it and then convert back in 2D. Would be interesting to try. However I do know that the SLC-Mesh is not 100% flawless. Usually it works fine but there is an occasional loss of information…

  5. yes sounds like a no brainer. It’s a very old support… the volume support.

II) hard ones:

1.) yes this is a hard one. Have you tried our cloud repair engine tha tis now integrated? ‘green’ plus.
The hard part with STL errors is therer are many many different ones. Often from conversion from Nurbs to Mesh. We’ve noticed last month that even Solidworks exports faulty STL files. (just a cube will already yield different coordinates per face for the same vertex)

2.) yes on the list.

III).

  1. You mean ‘unhollow’ basically? You could theoretically use ‘split disjoint mesh’ to split the STL in it’s mlutiple disjoint parts?

  2. You mean cutting a hole like this? Yes it’s hard to do right… you’ve noticed already the hollow function sometimes failes. But admitted this hollow boolean is done with little effort because a true boolean is very hard to do.

  3. Not sure what you mean by this?

  4. Yes this is on the list. Partially already implemented.

Elco

#3

Hi, it’s me again :slight_smile:

I’m still intensively using your software for file preparation.

For simple géométries ans few polygons (less than 2 millions),everything is fine and even the automatic support generation works well. But unfortunately, I have allmost only complex shapes to produce, from huge files. Before, when printers resolution was only 1080p, there was no problem, you devide polygons by 10 and it’s ok.
But now with 8k printers, you need to keep a lot of polygons…

  1. automatic support génération
    The algorithms are great but you still need to edit manually the results. And with big files it takes so long time that you better do it directly manually from scratch.
    My request is for support connection. In automatic mode, support are connected together. In manual mode, I spend the same time placing supports and connecting them. I would like a function that automaticly connect selected supports, the same way you do it when they are automaticly generated.

  2. holes
    on a huge file, when you click on the place you want the hole to be created, you have to wait between 30 and 90 seconds.
    In order to be able to clean and dry the inside of my parts, I put between 10 and 30 holes. So on the biggest parts I spend 2700 s waiting for holes to be created, doing nothing else.
    So I would like a “multiple holes creation” function that register all the places I want a hole to be created and then create them in one time. If one hole is not possible to create, it skip it and creates the next one.

  3. Shrink wrap
    This is the miraculus function that made me buy and recommand formware to everyone. Your algorythm rocks :slight_smile: It works 99% of time, and even on huge files.
    Of course, this function is time and resources consuming, and i understand why you limit the resolution to 300%.
    But nowadays, our computers have a lot of RAM… (256GB for me)
    So, I would like a “overnight shrink wrap function” with an unlimited resolution possibility and if possible, an estimation of the amount of RAM and time needed for the opération.
    If it’s possible to decrease the polygon size to 0.1 mm or less, it could be a good alternative to the “Unify” function in Magics which is for me the Graal for 3D file preparation.

  4. Replace file
    This is a great function, but for some reason I don’t know, it never works for me, it’s allways missaligned. So I would like a “free translation” function, that could move the new model without changing the shape of supports. Or maybe just a “link to support” button that could be activated or not.

Thanks again for your work
Have a nice day
Pierre

#4

Hi Pierre,

This is highly interesting feedback. thank you for this.

Of course my first response would be use smaller files :slight_smile:
But you are right i guess; with 8K machines the need for bigger files get largers.

  1. Automatic support connection -> yes this is something for the next release planned. It’s much requested.

  2. This is also a pretty good idea. I think multihole would be a good way to do it.
    Normally when you make 1 boolean hole it will re-index the topology of the entire mesh. This will take a couple of seconds as you noticed with a large mesh. So we could easily overcome this with multi-hole. Great idea.

  3. Thanks for the compliment. It took quite some time to optimize and write this out to scale well. That said; it’s already 2 years ago so we could tune it up a little. I will see if we can make a RAM estimation; or perhaps even better if we could do some kind of a partial calculation. The difficulty with that is if you have polygons spanning a large part of the boundingbox… another thought that comes to mind is if it can happen over night it could just as well be written to a buffer file in tranches of some sort.

  4. Ok. Can be added. As a matter of fact; internally there is already a ‘forceTranslation’ method on the parts. To move independently from supports.

Next week if all goes well the next release will be there. So this will most likely go in the one after that. 6-8 weeks.

kind regards
Elco