Castor’s additive manufacturing software, specialising in analysing and determining the ‘3D printability’ of parts has announced a brace of new updates for June 2020.
Available on the cloud or ‘on premises’, the updates apply to all versions of the software that scans through existing CAD files to find the best potential candidates for 3D printed manufacture, or optimisation.
The 3D Printer tray orientation has seen some changes, allowing users to override the default setting that optimises the price per part when determining a tray orientation.
Users can now set the part to be printed in different orientations, for example: accounting for part strength.
Castor also looks to help the user decide which orientation to choose by displaying the support needed, how many parts can fit in the printing tray and the estimated cost of printing for each suggested orientation.
A new capability in Castor’s algorithm lets it look at data from the CAD model and automatically identify opportunities for weight reduction, based on the part’s geometry analysis.
Users are now able to set a threshold for the targeted weight reduction and for the minimum requirements for the part’s wall thickness post analysis, letting Castor scan through all the parts in a project to find opportunities for weight loss according to user requirements.
The updates to Castor also offer to fix damaged CAD files using a mesh healing process, which includes automatic repairing, fixing self-intersecting, removing noise shells and smoothing hole-closing (watertight the model).
Other improvements to the latest version of Castor include new native CAD files support – with Solidworks SLDPRT and SLDASM already supported, Castor says that more than 20 additional formats are lined-up to be supported soon.
