Abstract
Traditional 3D printing is based on stereolithography or standard tessellation language models, which contain many redundant data and have low precision. This paper proposes a slicing and support structure generation algorithm for 3D printing directly on boundary representation (B-rep) models. First, surface slicing is performed by efficiently computing the intersection curves between the faces of the B-rep models and each slicing plane. Then, the normals of the B-rep models are used to detect where the support structures should be located and the support structures are generated. Experimental results show the efficiency and stability of our algorithm.
Highlights
Most slicing algorithms work on standard tessellation language (STL) models [1,2,3,4], as STL is a standard file format for 3D printing
We analyze the intersection curves to obtain a contour curve of the boundary representation (B-rep) model on each slicing plane
To speed up computing the intersection curves Cis between the untrimmed surface and the slicing plane, we develop several intersection functions, each of which works on a type of surface, such as a plane, sphere, ellipsoid, cylinder, elliptical cylinder, cone, and elliptical cone
Summary
Slicing is a foundational operation of 3D printing. It requires computing the intersection curves of models and slicing planes. This operation is time-consuming, and is a key factor that affects printing quality. Most slicing algorithms work on standard tessellation language (STL) models [1,2,3,4], as STL is a standard file format for 3D printing. The data in the STL file format is a discretized form of the 3D models, which contain discretization errors. Many studies considered a slicing algorithm on the original data of the 3D models
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