nTopology 3.39 is here! This release features our new Manufacturing Support Beams (Beta) block to help you design beam based support structures and bug fixes. As with every release, nTopology’s dedicated support team is ready to answer your questions. Please visitsupport.ntopology.comto gain access to helpful tutorials and support articles.
Table of Contents
Manufacturing Support Beams (Beta)
- Manufacturing Support Beams (Beta) is a new block that can help you design beam based support structures using our lattice design workflow or single face mesh generation feature.
- You will be able to utilize the Graph output of this block to generate support structures for the internal, external or both regions of the overhang area.
- Block Name: Manufacturing Support Beams (Beta)
- Location: Beta - Manufacturing Utilities
- Description: Generate beams under the points needing support on a body for an additive manufacturing process based on overhang angle.
- Input 1 : Body - The body to support.
- Input 2 : Plane - The build plane.
- Input 3 : Spacing - Distance between support points on the build plane. This input will affect the number of support points calculated and the speed of the algorithm.
- Input 4 : Overhang angle - The overhang angle that will define where supports are required. Regions on the body that form a shallower angle than the overhang angle with respect to the build plane will define the support volume.
- Input 5 : Min overhang angle - An option to define the support volume only to this minimum.
- Input 6 : Support region - An option to define whether to build support for internal, external, or both regions of the body.
- Output: Graph
Usage Improvements
- A block’s context menu will no longer show “Make Model Input” when it cannot be made a model input due to containing references to other variables.
- We upgraded our Parasolid kernel to v35 for enhanced CAD import capability.
Bug Fixes
- We fixed an issue where saving file names containing non-Unicode characters was causing nTopology to exit unexpectedly.
- We fixed an issue where saving file names containing non-Unicode characters were not being added to the Recently Opened Files list.
- We fixed an issue where Custom Blocks from your MyBlocks folder was not being registered as imported when added via a block's input dropdown.
- We fixed an issue where blocks could be dragged into the main body of the notebook but could not be dragged into the Inputs section.
- We fixed an issue where you could not make a block input a variable when the input value was a CAD Body property chip.
- We fixed an issue where CTRL+F wouldn't switch to the Notebook Outline Search while the "Imports" tab in the left sidebar was open.
- We fixed an issue in the Frequency Offset input of the Natural Frequency Response block that was used to produce incorrect results. We also updated the implementation of the block to address potential instabilities in high-frequency ranges. These fixes improve the results from this block when used as an objective or a constraint for Optimization.