The Voxelizer software can dictate how the inside will look

Oct 1, 2014 13:25 GMT  ·  By

When making and refining 3D printers, companies have mostly been focusing on the hardware part, enabling a higher resolution and precision, as well as broadening the range of supported materials. However, the “salvation” of additive manufacturing might lie in software.

The biggest problem with 3D printing technology, at least FDM technology (fused deposition modeling), is that the objects turn out wrinkly or full of ridges on the surface.

It means you have to spend a while polishing them and then maybe bathing them in certain solvents, assuming that's even an option.

What people may not know is that the root of the problem lies in the way software programs go about building 3D models in the first place.

Using pixels as opposed to triangles

Normally, 3D printed objects are modeled into STL files using triangles, meshes that can be sliced and later printed on a 3D printer. The resulting wrinkles on the finished product indicate where the slices happened.

A Polish company by the name of Zmorph has decided to change how models are built. Thus, its Voxelizer software will now allow designers to model with 3D pixels instead of triangles. The company calls them voxels.

In addition to theoretically eliminating the outer wrinkles in FDM 3D prints, this technique should also allow designers to model volume, as well as shape.

This, Zmorph believes, can let artists and engineers model each and every dot printed by a 3D printer. You basically control where every drop goes, instead of hoping for the best.

Another benefit to this is that the software allows you to decide how the inside of a model can look. You literally decide if there should be any hollowed out sections, instead of inputting the overall shape and ending up with a totally full (or totally hollow) object.

According to Zmorph, this opens up new doors for affordable production of 3D medical models. Traditional design and manufacturing techniques usually cost a lot, but now the money needed to procure anatomical models, or create replicas of limbs and organs based on MRIs, will go a lot more smoothly.

How to use Voxelizer

It's not such a big mystery. It's just another 3D modeling software really. However, it is compatible with DICOM medical imaging techniques (like MRIs, as we mentioned before) and should make it easy to print medical prototypes on cheap machines of under a thousand bucks/euro, instead of machines sold for a hundred times that much (or more).