Following Wikipedia, a slice is a portion of bread, pizza, cake, or meat that is cut flat and thin. However, recently a slice may
also be a slice of a computerized 3D object described by a CAD/CAM software and exported in a form of a STL file.
Stereolithography
(STL) is a relatively new technology that enables fabrication of 3-D prototype models. More than two dozen years ago the technology
evolved from the need in the manufacturing industry to pre-visualize objects before they were mass produced. If you have an STL file
and want to develop a software for 3D printing or other applications, like 3D computational fluid dynamics then you need a slicer.
Our
STLicer converts an STL file into a series of slices. The number of slices and the direction of cutting are user-defined. Once an
STL file has been opened, the program shows the image of the shape. You can look around it and/or change the view angle
to check the shape and the STL file integrity (fig. 1).
Then, the program generates the slices. Each slice can contain a single
(connected) region or several regions (up to 50 in the current version) if the slice is not a connected set of points. Figure 2 shows
a 3D wire image of the sliced body. You also can see the slices one-by one, as shown on figg. 3 and 4.
2
1
3
4
Another example: cutting a 3D shape.
The slices can be saved with a user-defined file name. The file is a simple ASCII text file. Each slice starts with the word SLICE
and terminates with ENDSLICE: Inside each slide, the regions are included between REGION and ENDREGION lines. The region data are
saved as a sequence of x-y (floating point) coordinate pairs, defining the contour of the region. The file can easily been processed
and the slides retrieved for any purpose.
NEW: now STLIcer comes with a new, stand-alone , enhanced STL (binary and ASCII) viewer. You can see the shapes, roatete,
zoom, define colors, light position.