“It’s fundamentally hurtful to me to hear people say you cannot print directly from CAD and you need a mesh file,” says Harshil Goel, CEO and founder of Dyndrite “That is so false it hurts my soul as a mathematician.”
That’s from “Skip the Mesh, Print from CAD“ by Kenneth Wong in Digital Engineering magazine, which explores the benefits of bypassing traditional meshing required by 3D printers and, instead, allows for printing directly from CAD models. The act of converting a B-rep solid model into triangulated mesh formats like STL can introduce errors, inefficiencies and a loss of design fidelity. The STL model is faceted, not smooth, so by its nature, it can only approximate anything but a curved or organic shape.
However, new methods allow direct printing from CAD models streamlining, preserving the original shape and skipping the conversion to an approximate, faceted modeler.
Goel’s company, Dyndrite, has taken a leadership position in skipping-the-mesh technology. Dyndrite develops tools that enable direct-from-CAD printing. Dyndrite’s files can be considerably smaller than STL files. By leveraging high-performance computing and native CAD file support, Dyndrite’s technology eliminates the need for meshing, reduces processing times, and enhances design precision.
Goel is understandably gung-ho about direct-to-3D printing. He predicts meshes will be obsolete in 3-5 years.
Impossible Objects, which claims to make the world’s fastest 3D printer, used Dyndrite’s technology to print CAD models directly — without the intermediate meshing step.
Another pioneer is Brad Rothenberg, founder and CEO of nTop. Autodesk is using a nTop plug-in for Fusion for seamless CAD-to-print workflows.
Materialise Magics is also printing directly to 3D printing using nTop Core’s implicit modeling API with Materialise’s Magics 3D Print Suite and NxG Build Processor.
