Whether you are a 3D printer manufacturer developing a software solution to enhance your 3D printer, or an independent software vendor (ISV) supplying 3D modeling solutions to the additive manufacturing industry, you are faced with similar issues:
Spatial brings over 30 years of modeling expertise to the partnership, helping both additive manufacturing OEMs and ISVs solve these issues and bring world-class solutions to the market.
We worked with Ultimaker to enable the import and export of native 3D CAD files in addition to STL files, enabling higher precision throughout their 3D printing workflows.
Watch Nicolas Boireau explain how CGM software enables querying, analysis, healing, and editing of exact and polyhedral BRep geometry. With out-of-the-box operators such as wall thickness analysis, feature recognition, and support generation.
This results in a smoother 3D printing experience for Ultimakers end users, further automating geometry preparation for printing processes, reducing cost and time to print per part, and improving print quality.
Spatial software development toolkits optimize the additive manufacturing workflow, utilizing innovative hybrid modeling capabilities to access and modify precise and polyhedral data.
This enables new innovations across the manufacturing process, including product design, importing data, model healing and modification, customization, support definition, slicing, , finishing, simulation, and analysis. A growing number of solution providers rely on 3D software development toolkits from Spatial to build applications that differentiate their product offerings.
This revolution in manufacturing, with new capabilities to realize complex designs, demands software purpose-built for additive manufacturing data and workflows. The leaders of this industry revolution rely on the industry-leading precise modeling kernels that Spatial has been innovating for 30 years. Loading, designing, editing, file healing & file repair, and managing the lifecycle of a 3D model for printing are critical steps, and with increased production volumes and complexity, maintaining high quality through automation is paramount.
Spatial's solution is able to optimize this workflow and allow for seamless translation from precise and polygonal models to the printer’s machine code, and ultimately the final product, while maintaining data integrity throughout the 3D model’s lifecycle.
Hardware manufacturers are facing increasing pressure on their margins, and OEMs supplying to the additive manufacturing equipment are no different. One method to increase equipment margin is through differentiation by providing more to your customers than the competition. A significant way differentiation can be achieved is to move from relying on third-party software to providing a bundled software solution tailored to your product offering.
Spatial provides the software development tools needed to develop your own software solutions, allowing you to control your solution. No longer do you need to wait for third-party support for unique capabilities of your equipment, or be constrained by the least common denominator of features. Defining your own software application allows you to create a unique product solution. Spatial SDKs allow you to build a tightly integrated solution using an industry-standard modeling kernel, including sophisticated additive manufacturing software components, with a minimum of investment and risk.
The user experience needs to be smooth with the software being tightly coupled with how the machine works.
We give you the tools you need to build the one application to cover the entire user workflow so users do not have to switch applications or use multiple applications to get the job done.
Working with a third-party application developer necessitates exposing your IP to the software vendor who may also be your competitor, leading to risks that your unique solution may be available to your competitors. Building a solution in house using Spatial SDKs allow you to expose your best to your customer without risking exposing your IP to your competitors.
Are your product introductions hamstrung by third-party software vendors who aren’t keeping pace with your innovation? Clearly, their business goals do not always align with yours. By developing your own software solution, you can ensure your software support is in sync with your hardware capabilities. And using Spatial SDKs help you control both schedule and cost.
Developers of third-party software targeting the additive manufacturing industry face similar needs to OEMs: having to drive market differentiation and improve time to market. But they have an added requirement to make a compelling value proposition solely in the software application without relying on the differentiating features of a proprietary machine.
By employing Spatial SDKs, your in-house experts can focus their efforts on product differentiators rather than developing and maintaining a modeling kernel or file translator updates. Moreover, your value-adds benefit from Spatial’s 30 years of experience as well as the experience of millions of end users.
The key to any independent software solution is interoperability. But with so many different formats, each with regular updates, supporting, updating, and testing file translators is a huge task. Relying on Spatial for interoperability provides you the ability to seamlessly support a wide range of formats, as well as greatly reducing the need for QA testing before release.
With Spatial SDKs, your team can focus on what makes your software unique. You'll no longer need a specialized team of hard-to-find modeling developers. The size of your code base is reduced, making your developers more productive, and improving overall code quality. Moreover, you benefit from future innovation by Spatial, all without additional investment in development costs.
While .STL files have historically been the standard used by the industry, it is well known that this format can causes issues, typically with broken STLs that need healing, or with low triangle density impacting print quality. A far better approach is to work on the original native geometry, preserving the original design intent of the model. By integrating Spatial SDKs into QuantAM 2017, Renisahw will continue to enable users to build part right the first time.
Software development toolkits (SDKs) are now used by almost every CAD/CAM vendor in one form or another. Popular applications included 3D geometric modeling, data translation, visualization, toolpath generation and simulation.
Why are SDKs so popular in the CAD/CAM industry? This white paper takes a look at SDK technology, the benefits and return on investment.
Stephen Anderson
Director of Group Software at Renishaw
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