How would I use Mathcad in 3D Printing?

[ptc-5307710]

Hello all, I understand this is probably a very "noob" question, but I'm just lost and I don't know where to start with all of this.

A professor at my university gave me the creditials to access Mathcad and told me to figure out how to use the school's new 3D printer. Would Mathcad even be something very useful to me? As I understand it, I need to be making 3D models of things in a specific type of file and then sending those to my 3D printer that can interpret and carry them out. Wouldn't that fall under PTC Creo instead?

Any help is appreciated, thank you.

[Werner_E]

I may depend upon what kind of 3D models and how they would be described. But in general I would say that a 3D CAD software would be the kind of software to chose, not Mathcad.

There are a lot of websites like http://www.3ders.org/3d-printing-basics.html out there which may give you some advice on the topic.

[arbiter007]

Mathcad would only be useful for doing calculations that might be needed in designing something that might be fabbed on a 3D printer. One could possibly imagine making Mathcad rasterize some sort of 3D object, but you'd still need to translate anything that Mathcad might do into something that's recognizable by the printer

TTFN

[RogerYeh]

So in case you are modelling something Mathcad, here's a nifty worksheet that generates STL files!

[VladimirN]

And the corresponding article on the topic: http://blogs.ptc.com/2013/05/02/points-lines-and-triangles-oh-my/