Pardon my ignorance. Are there any reprap or other style 3D printers planning on moving to or adding additional support for: Additive Manufacturing File (AMF) format - a new standard for converting 3D models into digital files for 3D printing and additive manufacturing?
I realize this is the bleeding edge file format and may require more powerful hardware to process the file while printing. So curious if anyone is moving in that direction and what would minimum HW req.'s be? Can a modified marlin FW cope with the new format?
I don’t see this as effecting the current lineup of under $2K USD printers but it may begin creeping in sooner than I might otherwise expect.
I think this is more of a slicer question than a firmware or hardware one. Within reason, the firmware & hardware don’t care (and don’t know) what the original file format was.
Ah - yes - key difference. My lack of real world experience showing. So first, the CAD software must support the output and the slicer must support the input. The printer would only be affected in the g-code if there were colors involved - which the slicer could ignore for monotone prints. But, there could be better, stronger, more efficient innards, however, in and of itself has not specific effect on supports - in broad general terms.
According to the article on http://3ders.org: “Unlike its predecessor STL format, AMF has native support for color, materials, lattices, and constellations.” And: “However, the STL format has no provisions for representing color, textures, materials, lattice/mesh structures, units, and other properties of the finished printed part.”
So the UFID folks might be able to utilize the materials function. I like the idea of what texture might provide. Perhaps the color functions might work well with the Kracken or other multi-nozzle extruders/hot ends. I’m not sure what the other variables might offer the home 3D maker. But the slicer seems to be the key software for many of these functions anyway, so I was just exploring what it might mean to me - eventually.
Right - an STL file is really just a big list of triangles.
If you want to have different colors or materials for different parts of the object, or if you want to have native support for things like circles, you can’t represent that stuff in an STL file.
So is AMF any smarter in the since of editability? STL for example was never built for models to be edited after they were exported hence a big lump of dumb triangles.
But with the advent of community driven model sharing the need to edit stls has grow. Will AMF accomdate that at all? I’m imbarrassed to say this is the first Ive heard of it. I have some research to do tomorrow.
I have not used AMF but I assume it will still require some form of CAD to edit just as editing STL’s and I’d assume that the part would be a primitive solid with no parametric dimensions to conserve space. I need to research more, but I would certainly assume that amf would not use triangles as it is a very inefficient use of file size. Other primitive solid files are much smaller and keep much higher geometric precision
So I was mistaken, AMF stores the solid model in the same exact triangular mesh format as stl. Seems like it’s just a package file that is zip compressed and contains extra metadata as described by others above. From Wikipedia, this was done to preserve the common slicing code for stl’s
The one difference I found in the research I did this afternoon is it allows for rounded triangular sections on round surfaces which I can see making for much nicer models
“Smooth geometry: By default, all triangles are assumed to be flat and all triangle edges are assumed to be straight lines connecting their two vertices. However, curved triangles and curved edges can optionally be specified in order to reduce the number of mesh elements required to describe a curved surface.”
I confess to having my eyes glaze over when they start talking about curved triangles but, apparently, having only triangles isn’t as limiting as you might think…
@Dave_Durant , excellent, that is a nice surprise. I wonder if just one triangle edge can be curved, or if all 3 can be curved, which would define a much more organic surface, much like polynomial edged triangles in fea meshes