3D mesh offset is useful for a variety of applications including CAM toolpath generation, hollowing solids for Additive Manufacturing, creating aligners, crowns and implants for dental modelling, computing conservative volumes for collision detection and safe zone computation for construction.
Polygonica allows 3D solids to be offset either inwards or outwards.
Polygonica's main offsetting algorithm is a polygonal offset, in which every polygon in the original surface is used to create an identical, but offset, polygon in the offset surface. With this spherical offset, sometimes referred to as Minkowski sum offset, the offset surface is a constant distance from the original surface at all points. Additionally Polygonica provides a map from the offset polygons to the original polygons.
With Vertex normal offset the offset surface is created by moving the original surface along the normal at each vertex. This offset variant can be used to offset selected regions of solid body, rather than the entire body. A voxel-based offset is also provided.
Anisotropic offsetting can be performed where the solid is offset by different amounts along each axis.
Hollowing - inwards offset followed by Boolean subtraction - is supported, as is Shelling, a form of clipped hollowing.
Polygonica provides advanced sheet thickening, where single-sided sheet bodies or surfaces can be thickened to a uniform thickness.
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