Sheffield-based MachineWorks Ltd has released Polygonica 3.3, which the company says is a substantial upgrade from previous versions, adding that Polygonica is a component software library for working with polygon meshes that ‘helps companies in a range of industrial markets solve complex 2-D and 3-D geometrical problems’ with main functions focused on ‘mesh healing, Booleans, offsetting, remeshing, simplification, shrinkwrap, surface and feature detection, and point-cloud manipulation and meshing’.

MachineWorks says the headline improvements in Polygonica 3.3 include: adjusting vertices during remeshing to lie on a mathematical CAD surface; edge blending and chamfering; shelling (hollowing with selected face removal); Z compensation for 3-D printing; ‘1D medial guided skeleton’; a new option for ‘healing complex self-intersecting support structures’; new point cloud registration options; and point cloud to mesh registration and alignment.

Also included among the improvements are: general point set to point set registration; sparse point set registration; closing of a mesh using a reference mesh; gap thickness and protrusion (height) analysis; support for feature detection of fillets and chamfers (pictured); scaling of deformation compensation; the tangential extension of poly-curves; the option to use surface detection in 3-D medial axis computation; a tolerance-based pruning option in 2-D medial axis creation; enhanced error reporting; a tolerance option for ‘self-intersection query; and the conversion of imprinted curves to normal curves.

In-house workflows
Fenqiang Lin, MachineWorks’s managing director, said: “As always, many of the headline functions in Polygonica 3.3 are based on requests from OEM customers in the CAE, AM, CAM, and dental modelling markets, along with larger manufacturers and dental labs now using Polygonica directly in their in-house workflows. We are also starting to see the fruition of some longer-term projects, such as edge blending, and we plan to release seamless UV parameterisation very soon.”

MachineWorks has been providing ‘3-D software engines’ to manufacturers and engineering software developers since 1994, and the company’s ‘toolkit’ for CNC simulation and verification is supplied embedded within a wide range of brands from major machine tool manufacturers, CNC system manufacturers, and CAM software vendors.

Companies that integrate MachineWorks’ components into their software solutions include: Dassault Systemes, Autodesk, Hexagon MI, ANSYS, Synopsys, AECOM, 3-D Systems, Stratasys, OpenMind, CAMBRIO, Xometry, Desktop Metal, Nexa3D, Heidenhain, Okuma, DMG Mori, HCL, SolidCAM, Convergent Science, SimScale, Topsolid, ZWSoft, Diota, CASTOR, CADS Additive, Intech Additive Solutions, and Go2CAM.