In past blog posts, we’ve talked about the Wolfram Language’s built-in, high-level functionality for 3D printing. Today we’re excited to share an example of how some more general functionality in the language is being used to push the boundaries of this technology. Specifically, we’ll look at how computation enables 3D printing of very intricate sugar structures, which can be used to artificially create physiological channel networks like blood vessels.

Let’s think about how 3D printing takes a virtual design and brings it into the physical world. You start with some digital or analytical representation of a 3D volume. Then you slice it into discrete layers, and approximate the volume within each layer in a way that maps to a physical printing process. For example, some processes use a digital light projector to selectively polymerize material. Because the projector is a 2D array of pixels that are either on or off, each slice is represented by a binary bitmap. For other processes, each layer is drawn by a nozzle or a laser, so each slice is represented by a vector image, typically with a fixed line width.

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