exporting aVRMLfrom SOLIDWORKS brings those body and face colors into GrabCAD Print for printing on a Stratasys J750/Connex3. Any textures or decals are still lost like in the picture above, but sometimes face
Our engineer, Tim Downing, CAN tell me however that the textures look great on curved surfaces in Origin, whether it is a positive or negative curve, and are great for adding small details and hiding layer lines, as we've seen with other technologies. Orientation and Support are intimately ...
Starting with the suitability to create specific product geometry, solid or surface modelers like SolidWorks and Rhinoceros are great at geometric shapes and smooth, tightly controlled surfaces. They will let the designer numerically define all feature dimensions. Polygonal or mesh modelers offer some pa...
But don’t get Stier started on how a bike frame would actually be hard compared to an aerospace part. “Although, on many levels, an aircraft wing is certainly more complex than a bike frame, there are some details in a bike—such as highly doubly curved surfaces and joint sections—tha...
These improved methods focused on better ways of describing and representing surfaces. In early 1960, Pierre Bézier developed a series of mathematical techniques that described curved surfaces of cars. At that time, Bezier worked for Renault. His work led to the eventual development of Bezier curve...
But don’t get Stier started on how a bike frame would actually be hard compared to an aerospace part. “Although, on many levels, an aircraft wing is certainly more complex than a bike frame, there are some details in a bike—such as highly doubly curved surfaces and joint sections—tha...
So now you've got a 2D (probably rectangular) image ready to map over a curved 3D shape. If we try to do the simple steps we did in part 1 of this tutorial series ("make the part parallel to the screen, embed image, and merge layers") you'll get a bad mapping: ...
Make a copy of the middle body Explode the middle body into surfaces Putting each body on a different layer makes it easy to hide/show/color/merge them after we're all done: Making a copy of the center body gives you one to keep as the original (which you will need for a boolean ...
prints. The STL file approximates the surfaces of the converted CAD model with triangles. The number and size of the triangles determine how accurately curved surfaces are printed. So, the more complex the original CAD model geometry, the more triangles it will have to represent those features....