Suport for .AMF Filetype Export?

[shadow651]

I was wondering if FreeCAD has (or could add) support for the semi-new ASTM Defined .AMF (Additive Manufacturing File Format) for (additive) 3D printers.

The current 'standard' is .STL, which kinda works for most things, but has limitations in some situations. .AMF also allows storage of some additional information related to 3D printing such as color or material.

Is there any plan to add this (or have I just missed it somewhere)?

Thanks

[DeepSOIC]

I don't know of any plans, but:
OpenCasCade seems to have support for multimaterial stuff. I am not aware of any places in FreeCAD where this support is exposed.
AMF format is very easy because it's XML. It just contains a set of meshes and assotiated materials. I think adding such a support should be quite simple.

[shoogen]

I don't know of any plans

This was also discussed in issue #608
Multimaterial is one important improvement. The second useful idea would be to export vertex normals.

[mrlukeparry]

Last year I was talking with one of the author standards (D. Rosen). It's a semi-proprietary standard which was what I was quizzing them over.

The standard is a certainly improvement but I remain skeptical and even though there's a small fee associated with obtaining the standard, unless you are involved directly with the ASTM committee or speak to the standard authors, it will be difficult to get involved with driving direction of the standards. The addition of normal information per vertex is useful, however, I cannot see how the multi-material modelling will fit into FreeCAD except on a per component basis.

I was told that Autodesk are looking to adopt this in their software but that was over a year ago. Perhaps when Stratsys objet 500 gets to the masses this will change.