From an Engineering & manufacturing perspective, the “mathematical representation” you are referring to is and always will be an approximation when saving from Native CAD to STL, which is nowhere good enough for manufacturing, because you cannot measure things in great details in STL and if we can’t measure things accurately, we can’t modify tolerances for manufacturing.
E.g. it a common practice for mould tool designer to compensate shrinkage depending on injection materials, but sometimes it only shrink in specific orientation. So a simply scaling wont work to a typical “negative space model” and they also add features in which design engineers misses such as correct split line adding ejction pins and cooling and draft angles including those small fillets to prevent tool wear.
These are the sort of details I know SLA can do and so it would be very wise to use these SLA simulated models to test out the production design along with all the necessary details from a CAD model first before committing to buy 10…40k injection tooling, which can take anywhere from few weeks to several months.
Those injection tool makers will never accept STL file. This is just an example from one manufacturing sectors, I can say the same thing about CNC press brakes (sheet metal) or tubing, investment caster, forging & CNC machining (still use old G-codes),PCB like Altium start to take in STEP as well even though PCB uses Gerber files for SMT or Wave, even the professional model makers prefer STEP file over STL. eventhough they have tend to have facilities to import STL, because STEP are more flexible.
THAT IS WHY ‘ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING’ EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE , IT CALLED “RAPID PROTOTYPING” to help out designers to test out the designs before commit to production and we don’t have that kind of flexibility if we use STL over STEP.
This is also why you don’t see a lot of STL files being shared in the Engineers community like GrabCAD or 3D content Central
In fact, why not ask Formlabs themselves and they will say most of the parts in their machine where manufactured from using a STEP file and not STL.
- Orange UV cover & tray = injection moulding
- Resin cartridge = blow moulding
- Build platform = cast & machine (I think)
- Wiper blade = injection
- plug & cable = low pressure moulding
- Main CPU box = sheet metal
- Galvo mirror Optics = float glass (method I think)
I’m not here to dismiss the legitimacy of using STL in Preform, but I’m saying it unfair towards Engineers sector who can’t use STEP, because currently it is inflexible.
And to answer your question I’ve used many CAD system from both CAD discipline (Art & Engineering) professionally & personally, AutoCAD, MicroStation, 3D Max (Briefly touch it with Maya), ProE 2001 & Wildfire series and SW.
In fact I’m a certified Solidworks professional since 2006 (quite easy actually), but I also graduated and worked in the relevant field of design research & development (this including 3d printing). So yes I’ve used CAD on a daily basis (along with 3D printing) since early 2000 this include communicating with other companies who uses different CAD system to ours.
From my observation with SW, they always add on new features and hope someone will use it (only 15-20% core features), but back in SW 2002 many feature have to be created manually and this simplification features over the years have made some new CAD users complacent in CAD modelling.
I on some rare occasions have to tell how SW support people how to model in SW with some really difficult modelling techniques like dynamic compression springs.
My Channel: (without narration)
But after all these years, I still consider myself as a learner as there are so much out there, because if you ever been to a University with CAD training course either as an artist or engineer, the first thing they will tell you is either Engineer CAD OR Art CAD, but not normally both because it is two very different discipline with CAD in which I so happen to experience both (formally).
I don’t consider myself to know everything even within Engineer Sector, but I do know enough that majority of Engineer use STEP and hardly with STL. Art CAD uses STL, which is fine with me because Engineer have different requirement than An Art CAD user.
The file is from GrabCAD (as I cannot show my work online), but it has a 4 window views features typically used in Art CAD packages (Less used in Engineer CAD).
