Meshmixer, as if you didn’t already know my fellow three-dimensional-printer-o-holics, is a design tool for 3D printing that is based on high-resolution triangle meshes. Meshmixer has recently been updated, including some genuinely useful additions such as an option to add or edit a custom printer and support for the 3D connexion space mouse. Meshmixer 2.3 is available for download now — let’s look at a few more reasons in brief to add this update to your 3D printing arsenal.
The latest iteration of Autodesk’s modelling tool for combining parts from different 3D models and outputting them to 3D printers was released recently. There were a number of anticipated changes, some neat catagorising updates for the organised user who felt somewhat limited previously, a welcome addition of space mouse suppor, and the inclusion of support for PLY binary format.
The PLY format describes an object as a collection of vertices, faces and other elements, along with allowing properties such as colour and direction to be attached. Sources of such objects include: hand-digitised objects, polygon objects from modelling programs, range data, isosurfaces from volume data, terrain data, radiosity models and more. Properties that might be stored with the object include: colour, surface normals, texture coordinates, transparency, range data confidence, and so forth.
Here follows a list of what is new in Meshmixer 2.3:
- New add/edit custom printer so you can prep your 3D prints for any 3D printer.
- New Make Slices tool: Slice an object into a number flat slices. Two techniques: Stacked or Stacked3D.
- New drag/drop solid objects in addition to parts. Addition of primitives category.
- Added part categories to the Meshmix panel to accommodate growing libraries of parts and solids.
- New Separate Shells tool to separate combined but separate geometry into separate objects.
- Better naming of newly created objects from duplicate, separate, etc…
- PLY binary format support (which is handy for importing the per-vertex colour meshes coming in from depth cameras).
- 3Dconnexion space mouse support.
