KeyShot Stratasys Priority Design 3MF
Stratasys has announced its full-colour and multi-material 3D printing systems are now supported by the latest KeyShot 10 3D rendering software.
Luxion, the provider of KeyShot software, has refined its KeyShot 10 platform through an exclusive partnership with Stratasys, which also involved collaboration with some of their shared customers. It comes as both of Stratasys’ J55 and J8 series of 3D printers and the new KeyShot 10 software are now compatible with the 3MF file format.
3MF, which has been brought to market by the 3MF Consortium, has been designed to solve many of the problems associated with STL files, including a lack of colour and material information. This new format can produce files with PANTONE validated colours, as well as simulate textures like fabric, wood and glass.
Speaking to TCT last year, 3MF Executive Director Adrian Lannin explained how the consortium had set out in 2019 to become the ‘industry leader in colour’, with a ‘groundswell’ of activity to come in the area within 12-18 months off the back of a ‘great deal of interest’. As a leading member of this consortium, Stratasys has become the first company to provide PANTONE-validated full-colour 3D printing capabilities that can also take advantage of 3MF’s colour information proficiencies.
Read more on 3MF: What is happening with 3MF? An update on 3D printing's next generation file format
Priority Designs, an Ohio-based service provider, was a beta user of the new KeyShot 10 software, teaming it with the office-friendly J55 machine. The company is said to have enjoyed the speed and simplicity of the software, which helped it to efficiently print a collection of design options for a consumer product application.
“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,” commented Erik Fickas, Senior Industrial Designer at Priority Designs. “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 heck of a lot of work. It’s really incredible what we can do now.”
With additional enhancements set for 2021, Stratasys believes the combination of KeyShot 10 with its full-colour 3D printing platforms can accurately simulate colour, material and finish (CMF). The company projects that KeyShot’s capacity to process the 3MF file format, CMF modelling can be reduced to a single day from up to three weeks. This, Stratasys believes, would enable the CMF design phase to commence earlier in the wider design process, reducing risk and speeding up lead times.
KeyShot Priority Designs Stratasys
“The J55 made true-colour, multi-material 3D printing accessible to design studios everywhere, but to fully transform how products are designed, we needed to make the whole workflow simple,” said Stratasys Vice President of Design Shamir Shoham. “Our customers are now gaining an incredible strategic advantage with KeyShot support in our PolyJet 3D printers compared to designers who are only using 3D printing for concept designs and turning to slower and expensive model shops for detailed designs.”
“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,” offered 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 colours, textures and other key manufacturing information, making it a huge step up from STL.”
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