The ABC of 3D Printing: 26 Facts, Features, and Use Cases

RENÉ SCHRICKER: Welcome to our talk, the ABC of 3D printing-- 26 facts, features, and use cases. My name is René Schricker, and I'm here with my colleague, Kieran Mak.

Before we start, our safe harbor statement-- I do want to acknowledge that we may make some forward-looking statements in this class. While these may reflect our current plans so far, as we know, they are not a promise or guarantee that any result product, service, or feature will be delivered on a specific timeline or at all.

So let me introduce myself. So that's me, René. I'm a Solutions Engineer for Autodesk in the team for-- we take care of the advanced manufacturing functions. My specialty is advanced manufacturing. I've been working with additive manufacturing for more than seven years now. So for six years, I have been an application engineer and trainer with GE Additive. Since the beginning of this year, I work for Autodesk.

So additive-- I'm taking care of all additive manufacturing customers in Europe. I also have a specialty in metal 3D printing. That is what I have been doing for six years. And I also did automation projects with my customers. Now over to you, Kieran.

KIERAN MAK: Perfect. Thank you, René. So my name is Kieran Mak. I'm a Solution Engineer here at Autodesk, just like René. I work with our North American advanced manufacturing team and, again, with a focus on additive manufacturing, as well as generative design technologies. So what this means is I work with customers to help them leverage these different technologies to improve their design and manufacturing processes.

Just like René, I also have a background in the additive industry. I spent about eight years or so primarily actually focused on production development of polymers. So we have a nice combination of metals and polymers backgrounds here. And I'm based in Toronto, Canada. Over to you, René.

RENÉ SCHRICKER: Thanks, Kieran. So let's start. What is this talk about, the ABC of 3D printing? Well, let's start with the first letter, the letter A, and also introduce it a little bit what is our plan today. So additive manufacturing is something, 3D printing-- is something that we hear a lot about. Think about it. Have you ever read in an everyday newspaper article something that refers to 3D printing? I sure have.

So in normal media outlet, I read and hear about 3D printed houses. I read about missions to Mars, where spare parts are going to be 3D printed in spaceships. I read about medical advances with 3D printing. Now my question to you is, have you heard those same statements about, let's say, milling machines or casting?

I made a little experiment. I asked ChatGPT. I asked this question-- what is the most important manufacturing method of the future? And see the answer that came from ChatGPT is additive manufacturing. So additive manufacturing was the first answer here as the most important technology of the future.

And now I ask the question, what are the dominant industrial manufacturing methods? And this is the answers that I got-- casting, machining, forming and stamping, injection molding, welding and joining, assembly. So it ended at the top six.

Where do I want to go with this? There seems to be a consensus that 3D printing has great potential. But apparently, it lags behind in the adoption of this potential. 3D printing is something that is apparently widely known, but maybe it is not understood to the same level.

And what are the reasons for this? Why is additive manufacturing not using its full potential? Well, there is, of course, a lot of reasons. And Kieran is going to talk about some of the challenges of 3D printing.

We both talk to a lot of customers and experts in the field. And what we always see is software and data can be the limiting factor in 3D printing. So I had customers who had massive failures with their printers because of some little print settings that were wrong or because the designs were not optimized. So there's a lot of reasons. But one story stuck out here.

So I had a customer who invested a lot, got a brand-new metal printer. And when everything was installed, and I came in to help him to set everything up, he asked me, where is the Button-- as the letter B-- the button for print? Well, I was, of course-- with all my knowledge, I was a little bit shocked because I thought, OK, it's not so easy. It's not so simple. But then I realized, OK, the assumption that 3D printing just works like that-- you just click on a print button, and everything is taken care of-- that is in the heads.

So what we want to do today is we want to give you an overview about the software process, the software and data process that is important for 3D printing. And that is the ABC of 3D printing. And the good news is the first two letters, A and B, we have already covered. Kieran, over to you.

KIERAN MAK: Perfect. So that brings us to letter C, which, in this case, stands for Challenges. So as René mentioned, the name "3D printing" implies that you push a button, and out comes a part. Think of a 2D printer. But as René mentioned, the reality is not quite so simple. And there are a lot of reasons why you don't see additive everywhere, why it hasn't been fully adopted to its full potential. And I'm going to walk through some of those reasons.

So firstly, one issue is print failures. They're still very common occurrences. And the yields on production 3D-printed parts are still often well below what would be acceptable for other more traditional manufacturing methods, the ones that are more established.

Another challenge-- and this is more on the software side as well-- is complexity. So additive on a hardware perspective provides a lot of freedom as to how you print parts or how you manufacture parts, just by its layer-by-layer nature. But it's often hard to really take advantage of that complexity and design parts because the tools that we traditionally design with CAD or engineering and CAE tools aren't really built with additive in mind.

Another big challenge is throughput. So the time it takes to prepare builds, post-process them, it still takes a really long time, and it's one of the biggest drivers of-- what you often hear is one of the big reasons people don't adopt 3D printing, which is high cost.

And then finally, many 3D printing hardware solutions come with their own machine-specific software. And that creates an ecosystem which makes it hard to create repeatable and transferable workflows across different types of technologies and different machines. And that is often really important when we talk about a mature manufacturing method towards driving full-scale adoption.

Now, these are some of the challenges, but it's not all doom and gloom. In this talk, we're going to provide you with some insights, workflows, and guidance on how to overcome some of these challenges. And so we'll walk through that workflow that René showed, and we're going to start with design.

RENÉ SCHRICKER: --which is our next letter in the alphabet, so D, as in Design to print. If I have to summon up everything that comes before the actual 3D printing, then there are three main categories-- design, part preparation, and then print data preparation.

What do mean with design? Well, of course, sometimes, you are completely free to create a design completely from scratch. And doing design for additive-- and Kieran is going to show us a great example with that. But sometimes, you only want to redesign. You want to optimize for additive. And sometimes you don't have freedom to change the design at all. Still, you need to do stuff with the actual design, like importing or correction, repairing.

And then there is part preparation, data preparation. Here, it becomes technology specific. So depending on the actual printing technology that you want to use, there is steps that you need to take. So, for example, you might have heard about support generation or packing or orientation finding, but also verification and simulation.

And then finally-- and here it gets very manufacturer specific-- you need to produce readable data for the 3D printer. Or you need to connect to your printer, and you need to know more about the actual workspaces. So this is the workflow from design to print. And Kieran is going to tell us a little bit about the different technologies of 3D printing. Kieran?

KIERAN MAK: All right. So as René mentioned, the design, the preparation, the printing process, it's often very technology specific. 3D printing is very much an umbrella term. And that brings us to our letter E, which stands for Extrusion, which is one of those technologies.

So when most people think of a 3D printer, they'll think of something that probably looks like this. This is an extruder-based 3D printer. It uses a technique known as FFF, or Fused Filament Fabrication. You might also know this as FDM. These are very widely adopted and commonly used in industry, or even at home, for example. I have one beside me here.

But what about printers like this? Or this one? Or this? Or this? So these are images of different manufacturing methods that all get grouped under that umbrella term of 3D printing or additive manufacturing.

And that's one of the reasons why I don't necessarily love the term "3D printing" because it is so broad. Someone who's an expert in FFF printing or desktop printing may not know the first thing about how to do laser powder bed fusion and printing in metals. And the same goes vice versa, right? These skills are fundamentally very different because they are different manufacturing methods.

In the polymer world alone, so when we talk about plastics, there are literally hundreds of different technologies, different hardware, different materials that make up this complete landscape. And as we mentioned with the silos, that often means that you need multiple software tools to move through the design, the preparation, and the printing process depending on whatever vendor or technology or even material is being used.

And herein really lies the challenge-- how do you become an expert at designing for additive across all of these methods? And that brings us to the next letter in our talk, which René is going to talk a little bit about our solution for that.

RENÉ SCHRICKER: Yes. So we heard about the workflow. We heard about the challenges. We heard about the technologies. Now it's time to talk about the solutions. And that brings us to our next letter, Fusion, F, the letter F, Fusion 360 and Netfabb.

Let's start with Fusion. So Fusion is our Design and Make Platform, and, of course, it is much more than just 3D printing. The 3D printing workflow is integrated in its workspace. So you transition from designing your part directly into preparing and print file generation. And that works in both directions. So you can also go back without the need to redo everything and make changes in your design and then go back in the other direction. No reimport/export needed.

And then there is Netfabb. Netfabb is tailored for 3D printing. It comes with a collection of expert-level tools that allow for redesign, for additive mesh manipulation, lattice creation, data preparation. The strength of Netfabb is that the tools allow customization and configuration on an expert level. And also, you can automate your functionalities. So let's start with the design, giving over to Kieran, showing us some examples.

KIERAN MAK: So we're going to start off on the design side of things with the technology that I think can help accelerate new design and as well as redesign workflows when we talk about additive, and that's letter G for Generative design. So if you're not familiar with what generative design is, we'll cover that here. And generative design and 3D printing are a fantastic complement to each other. And I think we'll start to see that as we go through the next few letters and into a brief demonstration.

So generative design is a design automation and exploration technology that's part of Fusion 360. So in contrast to a traditional design process like you might see on the left here when you're designing a mechanical component, you might start off by modeling in CAD first and then running some simulations, printing out or manufacturing a part to prototype and test.

What generative design does is kind of flips on its head and allows you to first define the problem, or focus on defining the problem, and then let algorithms do that work of design, simulation, and testing, for example. So with generative, you define the geometric requirements, the space the part can occupy, the performance requirements, the loads that it needs to withstand. And then you set up a study that tries to satisfy those solutions or meet those criteria while taking into account different materials and different manufacturing processes.

So How, H, does generative design enhance my 3D printing process? So there's three main areas I'm going to touch on. There's a few others as well, but we'll focus on these ones, which are, firstly, performance. So in many cases, the optimal design that uses the least amount of material or has the highest strength-to-weight ratio is going to be somewhat complex.

As we mentioned, the layer-by-layer process of 3D printing means that there are relatively few constraints when it comes to creating these complex shapes, which makes generative and 3D printing a perfect complement maybe, even more so than traditional molding or machining processes.

A second reason or how you can enhance 3D printing with generative is through manufacturing awareness. So we don't want to give the impression that there are no constraints in 3D printing. It's important to understand the best practices of how process, the technology, the materials all drive design decisions. And what we're doing with generative design is to build some of those best practices into the software and help guide the designer or the engineer working to design for additive.

And then, finally, when we talk about complex designs, it's very common in 3D printing that the output of these kinds of complex optimization algorithms or meshes-- those can be great for printing. They often don't play as well with traditional engineering tools, like CAD, for example. And generative infusion solves that by actually outputting editable CAD geometry in ways that we'll see later.

That brings us to our next letter, which is the letter I for Iteration. So that is another really big advantage of 3D printing is the ability to quickly iterate on designs. It's one of the reasons I personally have been really passionate about this technology. You develop a design, and then in a few minutes, or even maybe a few hours later, you're holding a physical part in your hand that you can test, give to customers, get feedback on, and then quickly iterate and make improvements.

And this is especially useful for all kinds of applications. One where I think it's a great use case for 3D printing is the letter J, which is for Jigs, fixtures, and tools. And this is a great place if you're new to this kind of technology. There's a lot of ROI, and it's a great place to get started.

A jig, just to level set, is a device that's used to guide an assembly or cutting process. A fixture is a tool that's used to hold a part. Often, for example, you might 3D print a fixture so that you can machine a part, so combining additive and subtractive.

And then a tool is kind of a broader category of anything that can be used to help with manufacturing processes. A great example of a tool in this case would be end-of-arm tooling. So these are often highly customized components that are used on the end of a robotic arm to manipulate parts on an assembly line. And because they're often so highly customized, so specific, they're often very low-volume applications, which make them really well suited to 3D printing.

Now that brings us to the last letter of this section. And, René, I'll need your help with this one.

RENÉ SCHRICKER: Well, that's my fault because I am German and consolidate, we write with a K, Konsolidierung. So sorry about that.

KIERAN MAK: Never. I can't forgive you. So, yeah, K here stands for consolidation, and that's another really big advantage of 3D printing is that ability to consolidate assemblies, like the one you see on the left-hand side here, from multiple parts to just a few. And this helps save cost and can really help simplify and speed up assembly processes. And so now, we're going to walk through an example, once we've looked at all of these, of how to use generative design and rapid iteration to design and consolidate the assembly for an end-of-arm tool.

So let's say you need a custom end-of-arm tool to connect a robotic arm to a pair of suction cups that manipulate a device. Now, you could manually create sketches and extrude and revolve. But what we can do is take advantage of the fact that 3D printing can easily produce complex shapes and use automated modeling that's available in Fusion 360. So this can be used to create a design in minutes rather than hours.

So we're going to walk through the process here, and really easy-- basically, what you do is you select faces that you want to connect. In this face, I'll select these three faces on the flange and the robot mount. You then select bodies or volumes that you want to avoid, maybe for assembly purposes or for functional purposes, to, say, attach compressed air lines or mounting screws.

And that's it. From there, you hit Generate Shapes, and what it's going to do is it's going to send those parameters or those volumes to the cloud, and it's going to automatically very quickly generate concepts in a matter of minutes. This is a little bit sped up, but it takes a few minutes to finish generating these.

And you'll quickly see we get six designs, each of them having a slightly different shape. You'll get a nice preview of the design. You'll also be able to see how it connects or change how it connects to those preserves or those bodies we had, as well as also change how thick or how thin the preview is before you actually commit to an outcome.

Once you do find one that you're happy with, you can hit OK. And what you'll get is actual editable CAD geometry. So this is kind of the first step of what we talked about in some of those benefits, which allow you to perform regular CAD operations. It's not a mesh, so you can Boolean parts to it. You can assign materials, run an FEA analysis. And just like that, in a matter of minutes, you can go from nothing to having a part that you are ready to put on a printer and test in minutes rather than hours.

Now, so this is a great start for when you want to quickly generate a model. But what if you want to iterate, right? What if you want to do even better? So you may want to reduce the mass of this part to further reduce the load on the robot and maybe decrease cycle time. And that's where generative design really comes in. So in this case, what we're going to do is we're going to take that original design from automated modeling and move over to the generative design workspace to try and optimize it and lightweight it and improve its performance.

So we're going to walk through these steps. So first off, the first thing I'm going to do is really try and simplify this design. And that's kind of a best practice when we talk about using generative design in general-- remove anything that isn't necessary to describe the problem. So I'm just removing any components, selecting the ones I want to keep, and removing the ones using the Remove All Except Selected command.

Next, we're going to want to bring back those preserves, or those three bodies we want to connect. I could go back and reimport them from the original design, but I'm going to show you a little trick here using some of the new seed and boundary selection capabilities in Fusion. So what I'm going to do is just go to Seed and Boundary selection and select the faces that bound the new geometry that was made by automated modeling. So these are those two faces I've selected here, as well as the ones on the flange. And all I have to do then is select any face inside the new body and hit Delete. And it will automatically remove that part. So I'm left just with those preserves.

Now, that's not just a nice little trick for when you want to simplify and speed up your process. We're going to continue with simplification here. I'm just going to keep cleaning up the model. I'm cleaning up the obstacles in the design and, again, remove any detail I don't need. So in this case, those suction cups don't really need that much detail. So I'm going to replace those with connector obstacles.

Those are a nice feature inside of generative design that allow you to replace things, like suction cups or bolts, for example, or connectors-- you can assign a diameter for the head of the bolt to make sure that it represents the obstacle but without the complexity that you might otherwise have when fully representing a suction cup or a thread.

That's looking pretty good. I'm pretty happy with it. I'm going to finish that and go ahead and start selecting my preserves, which I'm selecting in green, the obstacles, here in red. And then I'm going to use the shape from automated modeling, in yellow, as my starting shape to guide the algorithm as it's solving this challenge.

Next, we mentioned that generative design is performance driven. So the next thing to do is to start applying loads and constraints to my part. So here we are. I'm just putting constraints to fix the bolt holes on the part, and I'm assigning a couple loads on the interfaces of these preserves.

Now, it's a good practice when doing generative to apply more than one load case. Don't just use one, for example. Maybe design or consider multiple. So I'm going to go ahead, and this will be sped up a little bit, but we're going to include multiple load cases in this study. So that's just another quick tip for anyone embarking on generative design and trying to get the best results.

Once we're happy with our loads, the next thing we're going to do is look to set our design criteria. So in this case, we want to minimize mass and maintain a safety factor of 3. So we'll put that into our safety factor setting here.

And then here's where I really want to focus, which is the manufacturing constraints. So if we click onto the Manufacturing tab here inside of Generative Design, you'll see we have a few different options for additive, milling, cutting, and die casting. We'll remove all the other ones and just focus on additive.

There are three main areas here. So one is the orientation. We can take into account the build direction of the part as it's printing in the generative design process. And that's important because we can also specify the overhang angle relative to the build plate and the build direction to help guide the algorithm to design our part and minimize the need for things like supports. Additionally, we can also set a minimum thickness, which is important because you want to maybe specify for a given material or process what the minimum feature size can be. So these are examples of including those design-for-additive best practices into the software.

And the last step here is to assign materials to this. We have a deep library of your regular engineering materials, as well as an additive-specific library. So I can go in here and actually select materials from vendors and machine makers, such as HP. Here, I'm assigning this a Nylon 12, or PA 12, or Tough 2000 from Formlabs and SLA process. And that's nice because you can design with those materials in mind using generative.

Once that's all done, we simply have to send it to the cloud to generate. And this will take anywhere from maybe an hour to a couple of hours depending on complexity. And when you go to explore the results, what you'll get is the option to first review these visually, get a feel for what the designs look like. You can also get a summary of the data and the statistics.

I personally really like to use the graphical format. So we're going to go over to that. And we can look at, say, mass versus safety factor of each of the designs for a given material or mass versus part cost for a given material. And each of these dots here represent one of those designs. You could even look at, say, mass versus displacement and figure out which ones are stiffest versus which ones that are less stiff.

And we can click into ones that we're interested in and visually compare them in this interface here. Now, when we do that, these designs are pretty similar, but what you'll notice is there are some subtle differences that are important when we design for additive. So you might notice in the top left, the flange up there is flat, whereas all the others are tapered. And that's because it took into account the build direction in such a way that it tries to minimize supports around those areas to minimize the additional material you might need.

Additionally, you'll also notice the designs are thicker or thinner in the struts based on the material that was chosen. So in the other cases, they're polymer, whereas the bond on the bottom right-- it's a metal, so it's going to naturally have thinner arms for the design. So again, that's more taking into account additive materials as part of the design process.

Now once we're happy with the design, you can export it. And like we said just, like automated modeling, you get editable CAD geometry. So you can click on surfaces and push/pull to adjust thickness or make them more cylindrical. And you can also use traditional CAD methods, so do things like create surfaces and planes to create sketches, or extrude and revolve, and do things like add additional functionality to my design.

So in this case, I'll extrude or use a sketch to create clips that could hold in, say, the compressed air lines that connect to the suction cups. So really, that's one of the advantages of being able to leverage actual editable CAD geometry when creating these pretty complex designs.

So what did we look at there? Letters G through K. So first, we looked at how generative design can be used to iterate and optimize designs for 3D printing and how it can be used to improve the design of a jig, a fixture, or a tool and consolidate them into multiple parts in a-- or consolidate from multiple parts into a single component.

So this design went from the automated modeling version, which was close to 220 grams to 100 grams, which really reduces the load on the motor, for example, and can really reduce cycle time, for example, and ultimately result in a reduced part cost on the assembly line. So with that, I'm going to hand it over and back to René to talk about how we can push design for additive even further with the next letter.

RENÉ SCHRICKER: Thank you, Kieran. Kieran showed a very interesting case, where he completely designed a part from scratch. Sometimes, that's not what you want to do. So let's look at an example where we want to redesign an existing part. And when it comes to redesigning parts for additive, there is, of course, multiple options how we can approach that. But our next letter in the alphabet is the letter L, and so we want to show you the technology of creating Lattices.

In additive manufacturing, lattices are very popular because they are a good way to reduce weight while maintaining functionality. And at the same time, lattices typically build well on 3D printers. You can do that with Netfabb. Netfabb offers a variety of latticing tools that are allowing you to configure your lattices to the detail. But I want to show you today a relatively new method with Fusion because the volumetric lattice in Fusion is intuitive, and you can quickly achieve good results.

So here, we have a part that serves the same functionality as the one that Kieran has shown us earlier. So that's an end-of-arm tool. And we want to replace or we want to reduce volume at the struts that you see here, marked in blue.

And we want to do that by using the volumetric lattice. Under Modify, you find the Volumetric Lattice. And that allows you to assign a volumetric lattice to a component, which I did here. The moment that I select this, I directly see the lattice showing up because, at that point, it is graphics. Now, I can configure that lattice. So, for example, I can change the solidity of that lattice. Or I can change the cell, so the pattern that is going to be repeated.

One problem with lattices is, often, if we have a closer look, that when we replace the volume with lattices, then they end somewhere. And we don't want to have those open struts. So I'm going to show you now a quick and easy method how to avoid that. And that is, first, I start to create my own cell, which is easy to do.

So I already prepared a customized cell. This is what you see down here. And this is really nothing fancy. That is just a cube, where I've added four chamfers to, and I hollowed it out. So this is going to be my new cell. And that is a so-called 2-and-1/2-D structure because in one direction, there's no variation. So I'm using that now as my new cell. I'm doing that by selecting Cell Shape and choose the customized cell and selecting the body of the design that I've just created.

So now I see that my lattice already changed. I see that the pattern is now repeated with the body that I created. I need to make some more enhancements. So I just said, I want to avoid that the lattice ends undefined. So what I'm going to do next is I'm editing the volumetric lattice again. And that is a big advantage of the volumetric lattice-- you can always edit it without having to recalculate a lot. So what I'm doing now here is I'm selecting faces where I say, OK, here, with a given thickness, the lattice stops.

Now I'm almost done. We see we don't have open struts at the end anymore. There's a little bit more that I want to do. So I need to adjust the thickness, and I need to adjust the scaling, which is what I'm doing now. So I want to go from a uniform scaling to a nonuniform scaling because I want a good diamond shape.

Diamond shapes typically build better because of the less down-facing angle of the-- smaller down-facing angle. This is what I'm doing now. And I'm almost done changing the solidity a little bit. And this was a very quick way how I can create with volumetric lattice a lattice structure.

Now, one more thing-- can I align that more to the part? In that case, yes, I can. So I go to Rotate, and I'm rotating the lattice a little bit to align it to the part, and that's the end result. So volumetric lattice, a very intuitive and quick way to creating lattices for 3D printing. Sorry.

So the next letter in the alphabet is M, as in Mesh files. When you are dealing with 3D printing, you will work with mesh files. Mesh files are very important. Why? Because it is the most common interchange format in 3D printing. At one point or another, everything is transformed into mesh files.

What do we need to do with those mesh files? Well, there is a lot of things that you might do. So most importantly, you need to import them, and then you need to repair them, or you need to have the capability to repair them. And when I say "repair," I don't mean functionally repair. I mean formally repair. So there might be data defects that 3D printers do not deal well with, and they need to be repaired.

And what else do you need to do? So there might be all kinds of little adjustments that you need to do-- cutting, punching holes, or adding tags, stuff like that. And you can do that with Fusion, and you can do that with Netfabb.

So from all the possible mesh manipulations that might probably come up, I want to show you one interesting feature in Fusion 360. And that is how you can retransform an existing mesh file back into a parametric file. And this is my little demo here. So here, we have the same part. Now let's assume it comes in from a colleague or a customer already as a mesh file. But now I have the task, what can I do if I need to make those holes that you see here-- if they need to be bigger?

In mesh files, there is no longer any parametric association to the part. And so it is difficult to change those. But in Fusion 360, if you have a prismatic body, you can try to retransform the body back into a parametric one. And this is what I want to show with the demonstration.

So the first thing that I need to do is I need to create face groups. That brings up that dialogue, and I can configure the detail. And hitting OK, selecting the body will make Fusion 360 calculate-- will calculate the faces. After that, ideally, it looks like that. Often, you might need to adjust a little bit. So in that case, we see that one face has not been detected correctly. So there is options that you can manually, for example, combine faces to make them better.

And once you have done with finding all of your face groups, you can proceed to convert the mesh. So under Modify, there is Convert Mesh. And if you click that, you get another dialog. And if you want to have a parametric and a prismatic transformation, you need to select the right options. And there we go, transferring.

And as you can see directly from the color change, I'm now back in the parametric world. And here, I can now, for example, change the diameter with the methods that you have in Fusion. In that case, let's do Press Pull, and I can directly change parametrically the diameter of that hole.

So mesh functionalities are very important. There are a lot of steps that you typically need to do with mesh and all of those tools you find in Fusion 360 and in Netfabb, and this was just one example.

Now, let's have a look at our workflow again. And now let's move on from design and go to prepare your part. So let's assume that now our design is finished, and it is exactly how we want it to be. And now it becomes technology specific, and we want to show some examples what need to be done here.

So I want to start with the first example, and that is packing. And our next letter in the alphabet is N, so Netfabb packing is the example that I want to show. What is packing? For some technologies, like Multi Jet Fusion or SLS technology, you want to pack as many parts as possible as dense as possible into your machine to bring the costs down and make the print more effective. And for that, you have functions in Netfabb. In the easy case, you just select one of those functions, and you execute them, and you will get your parts packed.

But sometimes, it's not so easy. What do I mean with that? So there could be the case where you achieve a better result in packing when you combine different methods. Or, for example, sometimes you have parts that need to be copied multiple times. And at the same time, there might be parts that are more important than others.

And that's why Netfabb packing is a technology that is often combined with the automation functions of Netfabb. So you write your own scripts to combine the packing methods that you want to have and to address, for example also issues of importance of parts.

And this is what I did in that example. So I created a script that combines two packers, one that arranges the part first and then one that optimizes it by simulating a drop, which is called the Gravity or the Physics packer. And with that method, I achieved a better result in packing than I did with just one method alone. So automation with scripting and packing is something that Netfabb is very good for.

OK, so in our next chapter, we are going to talk about another data preparation necessity. Kieran, over to you.

KIERAN MAK: Yeah. So as René mentioned, there's obviously-- we're getting to the preparation phase now. And we've talked a little bit about packing. The next common thing you'll see that you would need to do to get your part ready to print is consider orientation, overhangs, and supports, which is where we come to our letter O.

And this is a really important topic. Orientation is arguably one of the most important factors to consider when you print a part. And it varies a lot depending on the type of technology or the printing process that you're using. But in general terms, printing is almost always a layer-by-layer process. So parts are sliced into thousands of individual layers.

And there are cases where, due to the way that the part is oriented, if these layers overhang or are oriented in such a way that a really thin piece can't support itself during printing or even is completely disconnected from the part, you'll have some of those issues we talked about earlier, such as build failures or distortion.

Now, when orienting a part, it's important to keep in mind the requirements of the parts, so functionally, aesthetically, the cost requirements. So some orientations may result in the shortest print time and lowest cost but may come at the expense of, say, aesthetics because you may have witness marks on your part or have excess material waste due to many support structures. Other orientations may result in longer print times but might achieve a smaller footprint, which allows you to pack the platform more densely in a single print. So as you can see, orientation is a very multifaceted problem to consider.

Now, tools that can run orientation searches, such as Netfabb and Fusion, can help provide solutions to address that and really evaluate many different orientation trade-offs during the build preparation process. So in this case, you can specify what's more important, supported area versus part height, and weight those accordingly, or even use a custom ranking, say, a cost formula, for example.

And when you run an orientation study, it will provide you with options and data to help drive decisions. So you can use data to drive the approach for orientation based on factors such as build height or the bounding box volume or support volume, and really just help you quickly identify the optimal orientation before you go down into the next step, which is going to be supporting and designing the supports.

So that brings us to our second part of this, which is the support design. And when it comes to actually designing these, it's a bit of an art and a bit of a skill. These can be pretty complex shapes. As you can see here, there are many different types. And personally, I spent a lot of time in my career developing optimal support geometries, which is time consuming and really challenging but really important because it really impacts some of those factors like cost of your part.

The good news is tools like Fusion and Netfabb can help save a lot of that time by automating this process, so automating the generation of these, as well as allowing for repeatable workflows that you could share across teams or across users. So we're going to look at an example of how one does that using Fusion and using Netfabb.

So in this example, we've got that same part that we generatively designed. And we're going to start off by applying what we call volume supports to the bottom face of the part. And this is just really to connect that part to the print bed during those first layers.

So next, we're going to apply bar supports to some of those areas that were tapered by generative design. And this is an important thing I want to highlight is that the support generation inside a Fusion and inside of Netfabb is highly customizable. So back when I used to use Netfabb in industry and for production polymer supports, the high degree of customization was really critical to getting the best results. And that's also continued with Fusion 360. You can add base plates, group your supports, now add cross bracing to make them more stable, and really just get the optimal designs that you want.

So once you're happy with that, we'll see you can generate these, and it just generates automatically. There's nothing else involved in prescribing these. And if you like this kind of template-- say you've got multiples of this part or similar parts that you want to print-- you can save that as a template.

So you can save this, say, as a volume and bar support template, which I'm doing here. You can save it to your cloud library and add a description so that you could then come back to it later, reapply it, or share it with your entire team in that cloud library, right? We try and make it very flexible and easy to make your workflows more repeatable.

Now, another important thing to highlight is we talked a little about meshes and interchange formats. But meshes are common. 3MF is one of those new mesh formats that now features information such as metadata, as well as information about the support structures in the machine. So now I can export my design out of Fusion as a 3MF file, and I'll save that locally.

And what you'll see is when I bring that into Netfabb, which should open up here in a second, you'll notice that it pulls in the machine that I was on automatically. So it recognizes that. And it also recognizes the supports as not just being meshes that are merged to the part but actually remain as supports that I can continue editing.

So imagine a scenario where you've got a designer using Fusion, doing generative design, preparing the initial pass of the build. They can hand it off to an additive expert or an additive engineer who can further refine the support strategy for a very specific technology and really dial it in, right? I can move individual supports to cover additional areas. I can also adjust them in terms of their geometry with live previews inside of Netfabb.