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Comment by avmich | Hacker News Reader

Seen Autodesk here, which might - or might not - mean that the standard is also applicable for 3D engineering artifacts. However I see no explicit mention of this in the article by the link. Can this standard be well used for, say, designing a model for a 3D printer?

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For professional CAD/CAM use cases? No. Those do not use meshes but more sophisticated and computationally expensive 3D modelling techniques. For hobby use? Sure. Most of that stuff uses meshes already.

Edit: it’s actually not just meshes that are supported. But the usual CAD/CAM surfaces are still not supported.

With a brief look at the example, it looks like they represent form with formulas instead of meshes, enabling fabrication from the form, for example. This is one of the reasons BIM software like Revit is so unhelpful for fabrication as they don't use formulas to represent the form so you can't get high enough accuracy.

Not sure what example you are referring to. I see meshes and some built-in geometries.

On closer inspection they do support subdivision surfaces! Just not the usual NURBs. So you could probably use this for professional modelling it just won’t be compatible with the industry standard software.

I suspect, but have no evidence, that it's the Maya side of AutoDesk

I doubt it - for 3D CAD there are STEP/IGES etc. Most of the 3D printing issues are from triangulation/voxelization of analytical surfaces rather than interchange format.

When Pixar launched USD, the release included a Maya plugin. That's a totally reasonable assumption.

Autodesk is huge in ’visual’ pipelines that are not directly related to engineering. Maya etc.

This is very litle about manufacturing, except you can of course always convert a model to 3D mesh for visualization etc. That is quite common, and in that workflow usd is as good as any other ’mesh plus material’ format.

The output of engineering design software usually is: 1) Shop drawings for building the whole thing or sub-assembly 2) CNC machine compatible presentation 3) 3D meshes for visualization 4) conversion to some other engineering format

You can always more or less export a 3D mesh, wich can then be 3D printed. So - printing, yes. But adds nothing to any other visua format in that workflow (stl,obj,…).

I don't think it's gonna help with the design side of things but USD does include a volume primitive type in its 'UsdVol' section:

https://openusd.org/release/api/usd_vol_page_front.html

So it sounds like it could be possible to use USD to convey data to a 3D printer eventually once the printers have loaders for the new format.

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