An image says more than a thousand words—architectural models are a great way to represent a future construction. It makes it easier to visualize a construction in a certain setting or to discuss and evaluate the design. Many architecture students, as well as professionals, will remember making maquettes through late night hours with cardboard or Styrofoam. Today, that hassle is no longer necessary! With a 3D printer and advanced 3D printing software, you can generate highly complex, multi-colored architectural models of your designs.
Cad2reality is a Dutch service bureau that turns complex construction designs into fascinating scale models. They rely on our data preparation software Magics – Magics20 was recently released at formnext 2015! – to make complex architectural models ready for 3D printing. Recently, they created a maquette for the new AFAS headquarters.
When you transfer a CAD design to a 3D printing format, the new file often contains many errors that make it impossible to print. There are holes in the file, certain walls are too thin to be printed, details are lost, etc. Many 3D printing software packages aren’t capable of maintaining important texture and color data, and the files are too heavy and hard to handle. But cad2reality doesn’t have to disappoint customers who send in highly complex designs that contain many details. With the Magics ShrinkWrap function, they are able to repair the most profound errors in a quick and easy way, without affecting color or texture information. “Magics ShrinkWrap has become a must-have for architectural files. These files are so complex that you can’t deal with them without ShrinkWrap,” says Richard Zethof, owner and 3D CAD Specialist of cad2reality.
Cad2reality managed to print this colorful, textured model of the AFAS headquarters perfectly. It’s made it really easy for the architects to gather around the model and discuss the execution of the plan. At Materialise, we are so happy that our software can help companies like cad2reality to create amazing models and make the lives of architects easier.
Do you want to know more about how this project was realized? Read the full case study!