Support Structure Generator for SLA 3D Printing (7/6/2020)

Recently I saw a job posting at a 3D printing company that got me excited, and it mentioned support generation algorithms as a potential responsibility, so I gave it some thought and decided to make my own support algorithm to show that I’ve got valuable skills.

The algorithm is pretty comprehensive. It takes into account the angle of each triangle in an STL model, considers the unsupported area between supports, and the supports are model aware, so they don’t collide with anything. This is all pretty standard stuff that you’d expect from a modern support generation algorithm, so I’ll get on to the headline feature: it’s fast.

My algorithm is fast. That’s really the big thing with it. It can generate supports for a model with ~112,000 triangles in as little as 1 second on a single CPU core. As a comparison, I put it up against Formlabs’ PreForm software, and with the same model in the same orientation support generation took 38.5 seconds. On smaller models of 10-50,000 triangles, the support generation is so snappy that it happens in nearly real-time (~35-300ms).

Making this took me a little over a week of work. I would have been able to do it in less time, but I decided to learn OpenGL simultaneously to build a UI, and that took a while.

Don’t believe it’s that fast? That’s fine, my dad who’s also an engineer didn’t either. So check out the video and see for yourself!