Researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute have developed 3D printing technology that is able to deal with large and complex 3D printing jobs with greater efficiency and speed. The new technology should allow smaller 3D printers to handle more complex jobs and at greater resolution and detail than is now possible.

According to the Fraunhofer Institute, with the Cuttlefish 3D printer driver, very fine textures can be reproduced efficiently at reduced file size.

With current 3D printing technology, factors such as file size, transmission and processing time add complexity to print jobs. This is due to the high number of polygons needed to approximate the desired surface, especially for large print sizes.

Researchers of the 3D Printing Technology team at Fraunhofer IGD recently published a paper – Displaced Signed Distance Fields for Additive Manufacturing – proposing a solution to this dilemma. The technique splits the surface representation into macroscopic and mesoscopic parts, and uses the latter to reproduce both fine-scale surface detail and smoothly curved surfaces. This results in an efficiency advantage that increases with scaling, especially for large print jobs, compared to refining the surface tessellation using flat primitives.

The algorithms described are so-called “displaced signed distance fields”, which augment the near ubiquitous signed distance field representation with a displacement field, specifying the offset from the input approximation to the true surface. This implicitly encodes smoothly curved or fine-detailed surfaces with respect to a coarse tessellation. For 3D printing, the models generated by human operators or by a scanning pipeline must be converted into polygon meshes. For a fixed print size, a fixed number of polygons suffices to print the object at the precision of the printer, but for larger print sizes, they must more finely tessellated, potentially with many more polygons.

Displaced signed distance fields represent the surface of the shape implicitly, allowing for volumetric regularisation of the implicit function and robust computation from incomplete or self-overlapping surface data. This is especially relevant in 3D printing, as information processed in situ cannot be corrected. The new algorithms of the Cuttlefish® 3D printer driver support highly detailed and smooth surfaces from low-poly meshes, in a robust, streaming compatible approach.