Message #3220

From: Melinda Green <melinda@superliminal.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] 3D printing voxels
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2015 20:38:41 -0800

Welcome Vladimir!

Great to hear from you in this forum. Everyone, Vladimir is a very
prolific geometer who has developed many interesting and beautiful
things. He wrote the VRML tiler that I used to explore my
pseudo-platonic polyhedra (what I’d been calling infinite regular
polyhedra), which have since been incorporated into Magic Tile. I was
very glad to learn that he has joined Shapeways where I’m sure he will
do wonderful things.

Even though you convert to polygons on the back end, it’s still a huge
help to users in many ways. First is because it’s not at all easy for
most users to do that conversion, and second because bitmapped images
compress so well. It’s tricky to set up a workflow that results in files
that Shapeways will accept, largely because we get almost no clues what
is wrong when a file is rejected, but since I’ve been able to do that,
I’ve found that your system is very tolerant of all sorts of
degeneracies in the data. My models often have lots of tiny floating
bits that I don’t care about, and in general I get exactly what I want.
I would indeed love to print voxels directly when you are ready. Please
just let us know when and how to do that. In the meantime, I highly
suggest people start fooling around with SVX printing. I just now made
my model below downloadable as it can really help to start from a
non-trivial working example.

-Melinda

On 11/11/2015 4:47 PM, Vladimir Bulatov vladimir.bulatov@gmail.com
[4D_Cubing] wrote:
>
>
> Congratulations to Roice and Henry on thins very nice paper.
>
> I would like to comment on the voxel format support.
> Yes, we develop and support SVX voxel format in attempt to make more
> convenient and compact
> file format for 3D printing of very complex models. The notoriously
> detailed hyperbolic models are the ideal candidate for using SVX.
> However in the back end we are still converting SVX into triangles
> using abfab3d.
> It is because not all components of the 3D printing workflow can work
> directly with voxels yet.
> So, your voxel model needs to be reasonable good for conversion into
> triangle mesh.
>
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 4:26 PM, Roice Nelson roice3@gmail.com
> <mailto:roice3@gmail.com> [4D_Cubing] <4D_Cubing@yahoogroups.com
> <mailto:4D_Cubing@yahoogroups.com>> wrote:
>
> Thanks Melinda! I didn’t know about Shapeways supporting voxel
> format - that’s great. It’s been two years since we focused on
> the physical models, but we are planning some more and this is
> really good to know.
>
>
>
>
> –
> Vladimir Bulatov
> 3D graphics researcher
> Shapeways
> http://bulatov.org/
>
>
>