All that structure is reduced to surface and slices
Once the CAD image is complete it needs to be translated into a STL (Stereolithography) file so the RP software and machines can understand it. All the work with planes, parallels and midpoints recorded in the Feature Manager Design Tree is disregarded and the object / idea is reduced to surface. The surface is made up of a matrix of triangles. A larger scale example of this would be Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome http://www.bfi.org/about-bucky/buckys-big-ideas/geodesic-domes. In terms of my needle, there were 11704 triangles, the more triangles the smoother the surface. In addition to mapping the surface with triangles it also separates the object into slices. All RP processes are ‘sliced based’ which you can see most clearly on the plastics RP objects. It’s how the object is made, using layers of material be that plastic or plaster.
