Materialise 3-Matic
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Premium Data Optimization Software
A great design for Additive Manufacturing usually starts with a CAD design, a topology optimized model, a simulation, or scanned data as input. To benefit from the possibilities that 3D Printing offers, you need a versatile tool to make design modifications on the mesh level.
With Materialise 3-matic, you can clean up rough data for simulation or convert your mesh back to CAD. In addition, it allows you to enhance your design by creating 3D textures, lightweight models and conformal structures, ready for Additive Manufacturing.
Experience Unprecedented Freedom of Design
With our design optimization software, you can fully personalize your products and create models that were impossible to produce with traditional manufacturing methods.
Save Time and Costs with Lightweight Structures
Materialise 3-matic allows you to create stunning lightweight designs, leading to lower material costs and less printing time. These optimized lattices outperform solid blocks of material in numerous ways.
Master Part Properties
Master the physical properties of your part. Change aerodynamic, acoustic and cushioning properties or characteristics, increase grip or control the density of your part with porous structures.
Rely on a Complete Platform
Materialise 3-matic is integrated with Materialise Magics and other solutions from our extensive software suite.
Why choose Materialise 3-matic?
Features of Materialise 3-matic
Design Optimization
Materialise 3-matic is a 3D Modeling software program that enables design optimization and modification on mesh level, using CAD designs, scanned data and topology optimized models as a starting point.
Post Topology Optimization
Materialise 3-matic lets you redesign rough surfaces outputted by topology optimization. this prevents complicated freefrom modeling work when moving to CAD , as well as more complexity and possible stress concentration for FEA
Textures, Patterns and Perforations
With the Texturing Module, you can directly apply texture, perforations and patterns to complex 3D Shapes within STL file. texture provides extra value to your Additive Manufacturing projects by adding functionality or an aesthetic dimension
Lightweight, Conformal and Porous Structures
The Lightweight Module allows you to create directly printable internal and external structures that add extra strenght, provide cushioning, increase porosity, or simply reduce the weight of your design.
Convert Mesh to CAD
Easily convert mesh file to a CAD format with the Materialise 3-matic CAD Link Moldule. The conversion will recognize the analytical shapes in your part and generates a fully parametric file without having to design from scratch.
Use the Texturing Module to:
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Individualize your designs
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Improve grip
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Avoid finishing work (since layers are masked)
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Improve aerodynamic properties
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Change acoustic properties
Key Benefits of the Texturing Module:
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Ensure printability and avoid excessive STL file sizes with slice-based technology
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Handle highly complex surfaces efficiently
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Have full control over the creation of new textures and how they are applied on your model
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Reduce lead time by incorporating textures in your design rather than as a post-processing step
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Keep confidential 3D designs or finished parts in your business
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Use textures to reduce the visibility of the slices in the printed part, minimizing the need for sanding and improving the overall looks
Texturing Module
The look and feel of a part is crucial to the success of a product design. It largely defines the esthetics of a part, but can also lead to added functionality or improved performance. With the Materialise 3-matic Texturing Module, you can efficiently create 3D textures, perforations and patterns directly on the STL file (which can later be printed with RP/AM technology). In addition, you have the flexibility to quickly change and preview 3D textured components without having to share your designs with external suppliers.
Lightweight Structures Module
Nature uses precisely designed structures to create shapes that fit the needs of strength, flexibility and rigidness while still keeping them as light as possible. Manufacturing similar lightweight structures has always been challenging and often impossible to achieve with traditional manufacturing technologies.
One of the key advantages of 3D Printing is the flexibility to create shapes which are impossible or too costly to produce with traditional technologies. The Materialise 3-matic Lightweight Structures Module realizes one of the most promising potentials of the 3D printing industry: optimizing your designs and translating them into lightweight components.
Key Benefits of the Lightweight Structures Module
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Choose from a wide variety of structures
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Add or design your own unit structures
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Apply it internally, following the surface or other options
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Optimize your designs based on analysis
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Process complex designs with the slice-based technology of the Build Processor
CAD Import Module
With the Materialise 3-matic CAD Import Module, you can create STL data from IGES, VDA, Vrml, Catia V4 and V5, UG, Pro-E and STEP files. Materialise 3-matic’s interactive CAD import reads the surface structure of your CAD file and lets you create detailed surfaces by taking low-accuracy surfaces and reloading them with a higher resolution.
CAD Link Module
The Materialise 3-matic CAD Link Module gives you the possibility to easily bring your file back to CAD. As a combination of the segmentation tools and intelligent automatic splitting, this module offers you the complete solution to convert STL files to IGES or STEP.
Included in the conversion is a feature recognition where the basic analytical shapes will be converted with the correct parameters, while the organic regions will be converted to NURBS to obtain a fully parametric design.
Remesh Module
The Materialise 3-matic Remesh Module allows you to fully prepare your parts for CAE applications. The surface mesh is optimized through different manual and automatic remesh operations, which control the quality and size of the part’s surface triangulation.
The Remesh Module also offers a volume meshing functionality, which lets you create Tet4 and Tet10 volume meshes. These surface meshes and volume meshes can be exported to Fluent, Ansys, Abaqus, Comsol, Patran and Nastran file formats. Additionally, the lightweight beams designed in Materialise 3-matic can be exported to Abaqus and Optistruct, which allows you to fully analyze the structural integrity of your lightweight part before printing.
Post-Topology Optimization
A Quick Route to a Clean File
Topology optimization is a next-generation software tool that reduces the weightof an indicated space, taking into account the material properties and a fixed set of loads on the design space. Results from these packages are typically organic-looking STL files, but with very rough surface quality. Materialise 3-matic offers STL design tools that clean up the rough results of topology optimization, avoiding the elaborate step of re-building these organic files in CAD.
Materialise 3-matic takes a central place in the forward engineering of topology-optimized files.
Redesign
Rough STL files can be smoothed, reconstructed and simplified for a cleaner part. All operations take place at STL level to exclude error-prone conversions to other file formats. Certain regions of the STL file can also be split to easily rebuild them as perfect CAD entities, such as cylinders, cones and planes. The smoothing and surface reconstruction operations are even able to redesign organic surfaces to minimize the amount of NURBS required to rebuild a potential CAD file.
Export to FEA
Topology optimization cannot take into account all types of stress on an individual file. If additional simulation is required to meet design requirements, Materialise 3-matic can export the cleaned and redesigned STL file to a range of FEA packages such as Abaqus or Nastran, reducing the design–FEA loop. The Materialise 3-matic Remesh Module can also be used to clean up the mesh for an even faster FEA simulation.
Export to a CAD Model
To export STL files as CAD entities, Materialise 3-matic incorporates a CAD Link Module. Using this module, organic surfaces can be exported with a minimal amount of CAD patches.
Export to a Printed Prototype
The anisotropic simulation of parts produced by Additive Manufacturing is still under development, but you may still want to do empirical tests on some parts to see whether the printed parts correspond with your simulations.