Almost any product designer will tell you that prototyping the shape of a new design with 3D printing is pretty easy but simulating accurate color, material and finish (CMF) takes serious time and money. Not anymore. Thanks to the latest technology in KeyShot 10 3D rendering software and the new Stratasys J55™ and J8 Series 3D printers, it’s little more than just click and print.
Complete 3MF Export from KeyShot
The full-color, multi-material Stratasys 3D printers and the latest version of KeyShot now support the new 3MF file format, a significant improvement over legacy STL, OBJ, and VRML files. By saving designs to 3MF, KeyShot 10 produces files ready for printing, with accurate colors and bump/displacement maps to three-dimensionally simulate textures like fabric and wood. Additional enhancements are planned for 2021.
“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,” Fickas said. “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.”
Stratasys estimates that 3MF support with KeyShot reduces 3D print modeling time of CMF models to a single day, while traditional modeling for final iterations may take from one to three weeks. The new workflow enables the CMF design phase to start earlier in the design process, helping bring new products to market faster, and also keeps modeling in-house to reduce risk of intellectual property loss.
“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,” said 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 colors, textures and other key manufacturing information, making it a huge step up from STL.”
Learn more about the new 3MF Export in KeyShot 10 here.
Read the full press release here.
See The Results
Listen in as the team from Stratasys discusses the new capabilities and shares with you how designers are already using this new technology to go from KeyShot to full-color 3D print.