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Section: New Results

IceSL

Participants : Sylvain Lefebvre, Salim Perchy, Cédric Zanni, Samuel Hornus, Jonàs Martínez Bayona, Jimmy Etienne, Noémie Vennin, Pierre Bedell.

IceSL is the software developed within the team that serves as a research platform, a showcase of our research results, a test bed for comparisons and a vector of collaborations with both academic and industry partners. The software is freely available at https://icesl.loria.fr, both as a desktop and an online version.

In 2018, IceSL has been featured in news, exhibitions and fairs as a well-established tool for 3D printing. Additionally, since its inception, IceSL's community has grown significantly together with the number of new features included in it for slicing and modeling.

In February 2018, we organized the first event to introduce basic and advanced features which differentiate IceSL from other 3D printing tools. The event, targeted towards enthusiasts, allowed its participants to follow tutorials, interact with its developers and suggest additions and new directions for the software.

IceSL was also presented in May 2018 at the Strasbourg's Mini MakerFaire to a general audience that included high school students. The audience was introduced to IceSL's new features first hand and their applications to 3D printing. In addition to this, IceSL was shown to designers in November 2018 at Affinité Design (http://www.affinitedesign.com/) with part of the developing team demonstrating and answering questions on the use of IceSL as a modeling tool.

In October 2018, both the desktop and the online versions of IceSL were featured in a list of the 24 best 3D printing software tools. ( https://all3dp.com/fr/1/meilleur-logiciel-imprimante-3d-gratuit-en-ligne/)

Regarding new features and additions to the software in 2018, IceSL has added several innovative methods for modeling and slicing. With respect to modeling, these include the ability to interactively paint values in a script (field tweaks), the option to export the shape generated with CSG to a mesh via dual contouring, texture synthesis on 3D objects, better font geometry creation as well as numerous improvements on its user interface and compatibility with hardware.

Figure 8. New infill patterns introduced in IceSL, the left one (cubic) has now been adopted by most other slicing software.
IMG/progressive.png

On the slicing front, IceSL has introduced new material infilling methods such as polyfoam [12], progressive and cubic structures (Figure 8) as well as putting a system in place allowing the user to specify an infill pattern through program image assets or shaders.

IceSL also added a new method to compute supports called “wings,” a new framework for mixing colors into a 3D print  [20] (presented in several exhibitions), curved printing covers, a faster slicing algorithm (in case of tessellated geometry), and a new geometry renderer [15].

The social community of IceSL is also growing accordingly. Its twitter account has around 200 followers and there are 150 users frequently interacting in its google forum. Downloads have increased around 30% after the first event in February 2018 to make a cumulative of 30k downloads since its initial release. ( See https://gforge.inria.fr/top/toplist.php?type=downloads. Due to the removal of a file, the download counter on gforge.inria.fr is off by 6000 downloads.) Youtube videos done by third persons on the usage of IceSL are also common (around a dozen in three different languages). And finally, in October 2018 IceSL launched its new website with a more professional look and additional resources (documentation, tutorials, videos, online version and new features).