Non planar slicer for 3d models

[BillTodd]

I'm posting this here because I think it is a genuine advance in 3d printing and because is is a singularly impressive piece of work.

This guy,  Joshua Bird, has written the hardest part of a 3d slicer for non-planar printing.

Planar printing is the typical flat layer by layer that pretty much all printers have used to date.
Non-planer allows an object to be printed with minimal supports and allows better layer orientation for stronger parts.

Prior to Joshua's work, non-planar print tool paths had to be mostly had coded or simplified to multiple planes.

eature=shared

[vtsteam]

Interesting. Thanks Bill. 

I'm mostly a hand crank metal and wood hobbyist, but last year I did buy a very modest 4" square 3D printer, mainly for making letters and numbers that I can stick to wooden patterns. Plastic letters can be bought for that purpose sometimes, but they are hard to find, sometimes expensive, and extremely limited in typestyles and sizes when you do find them.

So that got me into the software slicer stuff. I've used Cura, that's it. The above is very interesting, but I'm very low on the totem pole of 3D printing -- it's practically 2D, so not something that will have much use for me. But hats off for the creativity and complexity mastered.

[ddmckee54]

My hat's off to this guy.  It makes my head hurt just thinking about trying to code something like that.

Don