Polygonica adds handling of very large solids and support for colours
Sheffield - 6th February, 2014 - MachineWorks Ltd, leading provider of CNC Simulation and Polygonal Solid Modelling software, is pleased to announce the release of Polygonica, Version 1.1.
Large Solid Support Picture courtesy of Renishaw
Polygonica has always been able to process large models very quickly but the latest version includes automatic simplification for out-of-core solids. This enables Polygonica's powerful algorithms, including Boolean operations, solid healing, offsetting, and slicing, to be performed on arbitrarily sized meshes.
The threshold for simplification is by default 6 million triangles, although this can be changed by the user, and MachineWorks has successfully processed STL files of over 40GB. The maximum size of the mesh is limited only by available disk space, and does not impact the performance or stability of the process.
Support for Colours
For 3D Printing, this means that Polygonica can process other file formats such as AMF, OBJ, 3DS and many more. As well as healing, meshes can be sliced at any resolution into both vector and image based slice formats.The STL file format is the de-facto standard in Additive manufacturing, but has well known limitations, particularly when it comes to colour. The new release of Polygonica has support for arbitrary data defined on the mesh which can be used to represent colour as well as other data. This means that colour and other data is preserved during complex healing operations, such as closing the model, removing self-intersections, non-manifold edges, and noise shells.
Improved Healing & Boolean Algorithms
"The new release of Polygonica represents a leap forward in solid modelling" said Dr David Knight, Polygonica Sales Manager. "The ability to heal and slice colour meshes is important in the 3D Printing industry, where full colour printing is becoming more commonplace. Additionally, preserving arbitrary data on meshes, as well as handling very large models, is important for other industries such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD, Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Reverse Engineering".
