Abstract
Direct & adaptive slicing of sculptured surfaces in RP improves, quality & accuracy of the final product, compared to the slicing with uniform layer thickness or the slicing of facets (ie, STL). Present D&A slicing procedures adaptively compute the next layer thickness based on the surface information of current sliced contour, which assumes constant normal curvature values. In some cases, however. such assumption leads to intolerable slicing result which cannot correctly consider the entire local feature shape. We propose improved adaptive slicing algorithms which can determine near-optimal layer thickness, including illustrated examples.