Prep a file for a stratasys J750: wrap a high res image to o

Good Afternoon,

I’ve gotten answers here before so I’m back at the well of knowledge with a puzzle.

I work with bent sheet metal. Our products are anodized, silk screened, and then laser etched. Samples are getting expensive and I’d like to try and print a prototype.

Since the artwork consists of 3 colors and is relatively complicated (including text and images) my understanding is that a “Color by Texture / UV Mapping” is my best choice for this Stratasys J750 printer.

I’ve created my part in solidworks and I’m using blender to wrap the image to the outside of the part and export it as a .wrl file. From what I can tell, blender does not export to the 97 format, it seems to only export to the 1.0 format. And the printer seems to only print UV maps from the 97 format.

So, are there any of you out there that are doing something similar to this? And is there another software package that could be better than what I’m doing? I’ve heard of Materialize Magics and Rhino. But I’m sure there are other tools out there I could use to create my final WRL file to send to the printer - one that includes my wrapped image on the model.

Love to hear you thoughts :slight_smile:

C.

Hey guys,

Maybe someone out there might find this useful. I was unable to find a solution. However, I did find that I could do what I needed to do entirely in solidworks. It’s a bit labor intensive, but so is looking for a solution that does not exist. In the end I imported my artwork as .svg into SW and projected it on the appropriate faces. In my case the artwork was on the top and the back on the part. I made a split line from the projected art and then manually assigned colors in DisplayManager. Again, it took a while but it worked. I got some good results from the J750.

Hope this helps someone out there.

C.

Great, that is helpful. I have had success in the past on comparable machines using a .obj file from Rhino or 3DSMax. Even Sculptris.
3DSMax definitely has the most advanced tool for texture mapping. Any chance of sharing a photo?
Thanks,
Ralph

@Charles…if you have at least Solidworks Professional or Premium then use the Solidworks Visualize and then do the texturing there and export the model as an (.obj). Then, and this is key, make sure to have the option turned on in GrabCAD Print, in the preference—>GrabCad Labs to enable the textures of (.obj) to be shown once imported.