Henry Segerman wrote an Intelligencer article for me about getting started in this area. Check out http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~segerman/papers/3d_printed_visualisation.pdf George Hart, of course, is likely to have more to say than you can shake a stick at, even for large values of stick. --Michael On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 10:02 AM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
I've done some research on how to design objects & 3D print them, but none of these CAD systems seems to be interested in producing mathematical objects. In fact, the whole process of generating these drawings seems exceedingly cumbersome & labor-intensive.
It looks like I might have to generate my own objects using low-level file formats.
It would appear that the 2 low level formats currently in use are the 'STL' file format, which is basically a long list of flat triangular facets given by triples of triples (X,Y,Z) points, which describe oriented triangles in 3-space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STL_(file_format)
This file is sent to a 'slicer', which produces a 'path program' to direct the path of the printing nozzle for each 2D 'slice' of the 3D object.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-code
If I'm trying to produce a 3D print of a mathematical structure, it might be easiest to simply generate my own G-code file, except for the fact that this G-code file probably contains a lot of 3D-printer-specific information.
Has anyone on this list gone to these levels of detail?
Also, I haven't been able to find any simple programs to do minimal structural analysis on these models -- e.g., to determine if they can even stand on their own.
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