3D Model Data Generation and Conversion for 3D Printers

Recently, 3D printers have attracted increasing attention due to their popularization and high performance, resulting in expanded application ranges. Popularization implies that people are using 3D equipment when they do not have underlying knowledge about it. High performance can be obtained from several aspects of 3D printing processes such as an efficient way to generate a 3D model from images or drawings. In this paper, two topics are considered: improvement of the precision of 3D models from two-dimensional (2D) images, and their conversion into G-code in a time-efficient way. When making 3D data models using 2D images, there are several issues to consider. In this study, some case studies using standard software are used to obtain data in which adjustments are made. The conversion time strongly depends on the subject size. Although the amount of code and its complexity are high, 3D printers should be able to handle this process in a practical time. A system model is proposed to shorten the essential data conversion time for a high-performance process. A distributed processing algorithm for converting standard template library (STL) files to G-code is proposed as a means to process 3D model data.