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Voxels and 3D printing

kosowskikosowski
edited March 2016 in Hardware, Integration & Other Languages

Hi there,

I'm creating some 3D volumes using voxels that I want to 3D print, but I'm finding some problems. These are the two solutions I have tried and their caveats:

-Using Toxiclibs volume utils is pretty simple and straightforward. Create the volume with a volumetric brush and then use the computeSurfaceMesh() method to obtain a mesh that canbe exported to STL. The problem here is that the voxel aesthetic is lost as the surface Mesh adds some smoothing. This seems to be inherent to the marching cubes algorithm used for this kind of conversions, isn't it?

-Just placing cubes using a PShape works for rendering, but exporting it to OBJ via nervous system OBJExport makes a hardly printable object. It is not interpreted as a mesh but as lots of individual cubes, so hundreds of aligned cubes do not result in a plain surface, but individual bricks with rounded edges due to the printer's resolution. Besides that, the print time is really high. Checking which voxels are not visible and eliminating them improves greatly the print time, but not the irregular surfaces.

Can you guys think of another aproach, or how to improve any of the above mentioned? Mi best guess is to find an algorithm that cleans all of the non visible vertices and edges of the model exported in the second option.

Thanks for reading!

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