Efficient Direct Slicing Of Dilated And Eroded 3d Models For Additive Manufacturing: Technical Report

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, memory-efficient method for directly slicing dilated or eroded 3D models represented as triangle meshes, enhancing additive manufacturing processes with parallelizable and robust algorithms.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel direct slicing technique for dilated and eroded 3D models that bypasses traditional boundary computation, improving efficiency and flexibility in additive manufacturing.

Findings

The method is computationally efficient and memory-friendly.

It supports arbitrary chord error and non-uniform dilation/erosion.

The approach is simple to implement and robust.

Abstract

In the context of additive manufacturing we present a novel technique for direct slicing of a dilated or eroded volume, where the input volume boundary is a triangle mesh. Rather than computing a 3D model of the boundary of the dilated or eroded volume, our technique directly produces its slices. This leads to a computationally and memory efficient algorithm, which is embarrassingly parallel. Contours can be extracted under an arbitrary chord error, non-uniform dilation or erosion are also possible. Finally, the scheme is simple and robust to implement.