Slicing and support structure generation for 3D printing directly on B-rep models

Abstract

Traditional 3D printing is based on stereolithography or standard tessellation language models, which contain many redundant data and have low precision. This paper proposes a slicing and support structure generation algorithm for 3D printing directly on boundary representation (B-rep) models. First, surface slicing is performed by efficiently computing the intersection curves between the faces of the B-rep models and each slicing plane. Then, the normals of the B-rep models are used to detect where the support structures should be located and the support structures are generated. Experimental results show the efficiency and stability of our algorithm.