Recent advances in colour rapid prototyping

Abstract

Colour Rapid Prototyping (CRP) is a new field of rapid prototyping. An introduction to its recent advances is presented as follows. A new CAD format, the ETL format, has been proposed. It is both simple enough and capable of describing solids with arbitrarily complex surface textures. A new method for slicing CAD models in colour STL format and the ETL format has also been proposed. It is actually a voxelisation process. Other procedures for preparing colouring data for CRP have been presented as well, including thickening coloured regions in slicing result volume datasets and halftoning colour volume datasets. Finally comes an outlook on CRP.