Re: [rp-ml] algorithm&implementation for STL slicing

Hi Cristina

I once wrote some stuff for processing STLs (z-comp). I heavily used the
VTK toolkit (http://www.vtk.org/), which can read and write STLs. You
can also slice geometries, however I'm not sure about vectorizing the
output... VTK is great but needs quite a bit of work to get used to and
sometimes is very like black magic (Tip: always call Update() for better
karma). An other good source of algorithms is
http://www.geometrictools.com/ from David Eberly with really
extraordinary quality.
The bad news is that these are C++ libraries and not ported to .NET (and
thus not to VB.NET). VTK has a commercial COM wrapper tough. To be quite
honest I think VB is a poor choice for this kind of programming, but
please, dear rp-ml list, don't get upset by this statement like the Iran
thing, this is just a personal feeling based upon some experience with
VB and is only meant as a tip.

Greetings & good luck with your work

Greg

Cristina Kadar wrote:

> > Dear List,
> >
> > During my online searches I came across this mailing list dedicated to
> > RP and it seems a good place to put some questions.
> >
> > My name is Cristina Kadar, I am a student of Computer Engineering,
> > currently doing an internship in a research institute in Germany. They
> > are specialised in laser technologies and in one lab they need a
> > software which takes as input an STL file and produces as output the
> > 2D pass for the laser beam. My job would be to develop an algorithm
> > and implement it (in Visual Basic) for the slicing of the 3D objects
> > into the 2D closed surfaces.
> > I found some articles in the Rapid Prototyping Journal (e.g. by Choi &
> > Kwok; Vogt, Bertsch, Renaud & Bernhard; Tata, Fadel, Bagchi & Aziz),
> > but to be onest they are a bit too high level, abstract and deal with
> > the some special problems (like adaptive slicing) that I don’t need. I
> > am looking for a basic algorithm/ implementation. Maybe there are some
> > open-source applications already?
> > It would be great if somebody could point some directions for me:
> > online sources, books, something that could guide me in the first steps.
> > Thank you! :)
> > Regards,
> > Cristina
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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>
Received on Sat Aug 19 13:04:29 2006