MeshUp: Mashup for meshes

T. Vilbrandt (Norway), E. Malikova (Russia)

Uformia, Furuflaten, Norway

e_mal@inbox.ru

Uformia, a software company with 25 years of research behind its system (http://uformia.com/company), has announced that it is going to save the world from polygons with the long-awaited release of its first product Symvol and a Kickstarter project called MeshUp.

Polygons are a surface-based modeling approach that has been used successfully in computer graphics for many years. However, they suffer from major drawbacks when it comes to 3D printing. They commonly exhibit holes and intersections that require time and effort to fix. Also, because there is no inherent knowledge of an object's volume, multi-material and material blends are impossible to define with polygons.

Uformia's approach is to model with pure mathematical volumes (not voxels or parametric surfaces) so there is no costly fixing process before an object is printed. To support the plethora of existing modeling tools, Uformia's engine also allows meshes to be imported, automatically fixed and treated as volume objects.

A lot of scientific data that is a result of computer modeling is presented in form of mesh with attributes assigned to it’s components (polygons, vertices, etc.), what brings the same “polygon problem “ to scientific data visualization area and makes Uformia's products very useful at this area. For example partial solvent accessible surface meshes are often brought with holes as they are generated for selected parts of molecule, but not entire molecule . On Fig.1 is presented a caffeine solvent accessible surface for specific group (CH or CH3) (here is an example from Jmol documentation page is considered (http://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/docs/examples-11/isosurface.htm?topic=12).

Fig.1

Solvent accessible surfaces described by such meshes may be difficult to study and they cannot be printed in such state, so we need to repair it in order to obtain closed mesh. An according volume description can easily match this repaired mesh objects and afterwards can be printed (Fig.2, 3).

Fig.2

Fig.3

MeshUp will be available for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Symvol for Rhino is available as a free and feature limited Maker version that works on Windows and require Rhinoceros® version 4.0 SR8+. MeshUp is now a live project on Kickstarter, accepting donations.

For more information, visit: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/723819776/meshup-mashup-for-meshes