Cuttlefish This universal 3-D printer driver from Fraunhofer Institute is especially well-suited to controlling high-resolution, multi-material printers. It employs RGBA textures, which contain information on color and translucency, from opaque to fully transparent. When used with printers whose makers have given Fraunhofer Institute access to the firmware, such as the Stratasys Polyjet 3-D printer, Cuttlefish can enable prints with highly realistic reproduction.
What’s new? Support for the Mimaki 3DUJ-553 printer.
Benefits Fine-detail prints. Using Cuttlefish, applicable 3-D printers can create prints with photorealistic color and translucency as well as fine color transitions and complex patterns. Cuttlefish enables automatic hollowing on 3-D prints to reduce material usage, and for the Mimaki printer specifically it can reduce the amount of support material needed.
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD, Darmstadt, Germany, 49 6151 155-250, www.igd.fraunhofer.de/en/
