A CAD modeling system for heterogeneous object

A heterogeneous object (HO) modeling system independent of any commercial CAD packages is introduced in this paper. CAD models can be converted into 2D slices with heterogeneous material information for the fabrication of rapid prototyping technique. In this framework, volumetric dataset (VD) is employed to represent the material variations, which lend the flexible manipulability to HO representation, while geometry model is used to describe the shape of an object, which guarantees the accuracy of final HO slices. Two schemes are used to evaluate the composition variations in this system. Ray casting is utilized to visualize the HO volumetric dataset.