Models made to be manufacturing diagrams often need editing to be ready for 3D printing.

As 3D printing reaches beyond the largest manufacturers and into small businesses and the hobbyist community, people are discovering that models made to be 3D manufacturing diagrams are often not good enough to be directly manufactured via 3D printing. Edges that leak and walls that are too thin are only two of many issues that never were a problem before 3D printing came along.

Budget CAD vendor IMSI/Design is introducing an add-on to its Mac TurboCAD to get its users a way to clean up their models. TurboCAD Mac PowerPack provides tools to validate parts for 3D Printing, simplify mesh/entity verification and repair, as well as layer, color, units, and entity name utilities.

PowerPack adds these feature sets to TurboCAD Mac:

3D printing tools: A collection of tools to check and prepare a part for 3D printing. Example tools include an overall 3D print check, slice preview, overhang and wall thickness analysis, and a surface normals check.

Mesh, curve, surface, and solid modeling tools: Dozens of new tools to verify and repair mesh, curves, surfaces, and solids.

General Utility Tools: A collection of tools for manipulating entity attributes to better manage CAD data.

The $99 add-on is available directly from IMSI/Design.