Support Structure Visualization in a Virtual Reality Environment

This paper describes how a link between Virtual Reality and Rapid Prototyping was established at Clemson to enhance the designer’s understanding of manufacturing issues. It concentrates on the topic of support structures for rapid prototyping processes. The paper presents a survey of the litera ture in the area of Virtual Reality and discusses some of the issues of translating an STL model into the appropriate format for Virtual Reality. Too often, the support structures are either missing, or placed in locations that do not really require support. Visualizing these support structures is a tedious task, rarely performed, and problems are not discovered until the part is built. Virtual Reality is proposed as a tool to help designers and manufacturing engineers see and identify these problems before building the part. The virtual environment also provides the designer with a tool that was never dreamed of. The ability to penetrate a design, study it from inside or outside, scale it to a size which allows such interaction is only now possible with virtual reality. The presentation will highlight some of these benefits which allow virtual prototyping before physical prototyping is started.