Method employing sequential two-dimensional geometry for producing shells for fabrication by a rapid prototyping system

摘要

Beginning with a CAD specification of an object, the method and apparatus of the invention reduces the overall time to produce a shell of the object with a rapid prototyping machine. The reduction in time is achieved by interleaving the computation and the building tasks and by not requiring an explicit evaluation of a shell of the solid at the outset. The method is shown to operate with STL data, or with other CAD data, directly, and can also be employed to create non-planar objects, such as models of sheet metal parts that are represented only as surfaces. Furthermore, the method can be employed to produce a smooth outer surface even when employing polyhedral approximations to the surfaces of the object. IMAGE