MachineWorks Ltd, a company that has been providing advanced 3D software engines to manufacturers and engineering software developers since 1994, has made available example source code supporting data transfer of 3MF files with Polygonica – MachineWorks’ unique Boolean engine that provides automatic mesh repair and offsetting capabilities.
Most existing Polygonica customers exchange data between Polygonica and the host application using direct memory API calls. However, there are occasions where file transfers directly into, or from, the Polygonica libraries are necessary, or convenient. The Polygonica libraries provide APIs to support direct serialization to, and from, STL, and also to and from the proprietary .pgs format – a fast and convenient way to archive in-session data or transfer data between micro-services on a scalable cloud back-end.
Manufacturing on Demand
Spinal implant including surface lattice defined using 3MF Beam Lattice extension
Beam Lattice extension clipped with a cube
The focus of the core Polygonica product team is to continue to build the best polygon modeling and mesh processing library available – suitable for use in a wide range of industrial applications and markets. Whilst broad file format support is not part of this core goal, the MachineWorks’ Consulting Engineering team is tasked with making life for client software developers easier, so they can more easily test if the algorithms in Polygonica meet their requirements.
There have been many requests for direct support of the 3MF format, due to Polygonica’s wide usage in leading additive manufacturing software. As an answer to these requests, the Consulting Engineering team has developed a bridge between 3MF and Polygonica, which is available to customers and evaluees in unsupported source code. The bridge covers most of the core 3MF specifications, and the Beam Lattice extension.
Members of the 3MF Consortium, and others, have also contributed to the creation of this bridge by providing the open-source lib3MF libraries on which the new example code is based. Images are based on standard examples supplied at the lib3MF GitHub.
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Author: Edward Wakefield
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