For example, if you generate the slice thickness at 0.0135 mm, and your printing mode is High Mix, the printer will print each image twice to reach the desired thickness of 0.027 mm. Best practice is to create your slices to match the mode you will be printing in. (Note: If your slice thickness does not match the printer layer thickness, the printer will try to compensate for the difference. You should plan to slice your desired final shape at a layer height that matches what the J750 can do.įor example, in our sphere below, each PNG slice is assumed to be 0.027 mm from the next to make the final shape. Step 4: Rule 2: The Z gap between slices should match a printer layer setting.We will use Matlab looping commands to make sure each slice is the same size. Those are just the dimensions the engineer who created the slices chose. He could have chosen any dimension, as long as EVERY slice in a print was the same. For example, in our sphere below, each PNG slice is a rectangle 709 pixels high x 1424 pixels wide (even at slices near the top and bottom of the sphere, where not much is happening). Step 3: Rule 1: All slices must be the same dimensionsĮvery slice in our Voxel print must have the same pixel dimensions (width and height).You could stack them one on top of each other in a J750 and get a print like this: It’s easy to imagine that if you had 1,000+ progressive slices for each layer of your voxel print that looked like this: They are regular, rectangular structures that contain color or material data for that point in the 3D print.īut instead of picturing voxels in 3D, a better mental image may be thinking of what is happening in 2D, with every slice of a 3D print. Instead of shapes being “voxelized,” slices are being “rasterized.” You can see that to represent a letter in 2D, we have to make many decisions about which square in the grid is darkly filled, lightly filled, or not filled at all.īecause making thousands of those decisions for every slice results in a huge matrix of values, that is one reason to use Matlab, which has many tools to manipulate large matrices. Just like 2D digital images are made up of pixels, you can think of 3D digital shapes as being made up of “voxels.” The following is brought to you by Stratasys:
#How to get greek letters in matlab how to#
It is NOT intended to be a comprehensive lesson on how to use the Matlab software or PolyJet printers. This tutorial is intended for users who already have a passing familiarity with Matlab and J750 operation.