Stratasys’ latest technological partnership aims to improve full color, multimaterial 3D printing by facilitating simulation of color, material and finish (CMF) using KeyShot 10 3D rendering software.
The announcement follows the company’s recent partnership with nTopology to provide engineers with a series of customizable Design for Additive Manufacturing workflows.
The latest version of KeyShot 3D rendering software will be utilized on J55™ and J8 Series 3D printers and will support the new 3MF file format, a significant improvement over legacy STL, OBJ, and VRML files.
As a reminder, 3MF is an increasingly popular open-source file format published by the 3MF Consortium, of which Stratasys is a leading member. The format improves workflow because it includes all model information in one package, even down to voxel level control of the interior and metadata of the model. While other 3D printing companies provide support for the 3MF model, Stratasys is the only company providing a PANTONE-Validated™ full color, multi-material 3D printer that can take full advantage of the 3MF format’s capabilities. In addition to KeyShot, Stratasys also provides 3MF support for a variety of other applications, including SOLIDWORKS®.
According to Stratasys, by saving designs to 3MF, KeyShot 10 produces files ready for printing, with accurate colors and bump/displacement maps to three-dimensionally simulate textures like fabric and wood. Additional enhancements are planned for 2021.
Product development company, Priority Designs was one of the beta users that tested the combination of KeyShot and Stratasys’ technology and was pretty impressed with the speed and simplicity to create new design options.
“We developed this Bluetooth speaker model and used KeyShot to add all the textures like the speaker grill, then just saved to the new 3MF file format for 3D printing,” Erik Fickas, senior industrial designer said. “Overnight, we had five different models with five different wood samples and different fabric samples. To rapid prototype a wood texture would have been a lot of work. It’s really incredible what we can do now.”
Stratasys estimates that 3MF support with KeyShot can reduce 3D print modeling time of CMF models to a single day, while traditional modeling for final iterations can take from one to three weeks. The new workflow enables the CMF design phase to start earlier in the design process, helping bring new products to market faster, and also keeps modeling in-house to reduce risk of intellectual property loss.
“We were able to put automatic UV Unwrapping, baking and file packaging all in one step, allowing easy, fast, and intuitive 3D printing with next generation full CMF printers such as the J55,” said Luxion Vice President of Product and Strategy, Derek Cicero. “We are proud to embrace 3MF with Stratasys as an industry-backed, open format, containing data about colors, textures and other key manufacturing information, making it a huge step up from STL.”
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