Feed URL
Tuesday
Oct182011
Waiting For AMF
Some months ago (March actually) we wrote about a new file format for additive manufacturing that had been approved after long discussion: AMF, the Additive Manufacturing Format. This new format included a variety of key features to dramatically improve the information content found in 3D models. Meta data, materials, colors, textures and more were all included. 3D print operators began to drool all over.
On June 17th of this year, AMF leader Prof. Hod Lipson announced:
The AMF fomat has been officially approved by ASTM and will be published shortly as ASTM F2915. I have created a wikipedia entry describing key aspects. Please feel free to edit.
But here we are several months later and as far as we can tell, there hasn't been moves by the 3D modeling tool makers to adopt AMF, even as a test. When they do we'll gain a huge step forward in the software side of the 3D printing equation. Perhaps these vendors have secret internal projects underway and we'll see the results of their work only later on.
Does anyone know of AMF adoption by any tools yet?
7 Comments
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to our Feed
Reader Comments (7)
AMF is hard to fully implement and does not reflect any existing modeling tools or 3D printers. It strange mix of many things and may require more 3D libraries and code than many 3D engines. It is not clearly helpful. Part with better mesh definition than STL is good and can be made quickly.
Digital Factory - Patent Pending from Digital Reality powers Kraftwurx.com... digital Factory will support the AMF file format begining in the spring of 2012.
Kraftwurx is launching in in just a few weeks !
I know personally about a number of AMF imlementations being developed, but I'll let those people/companies announce their plans at a time and place that works for them.
In general, the format has many new capabilities, but STL-equivalent implementation is very quick to implement. See some code here:
http://amff.wikispaces.com/STL+to+AMF+converter
Hod Lipson
Hod and I are getting open source c++ AMF libraries together implementing the full amf spec to foster adoption as well. They will be announced soon via the AMF wiki. http://amff.wikispaces.com
@Hod and Jon - thanks very much for the information. We suspected some activity was taking place behind the scenes, but nothing much is publicly visible yet. We're looking forward to seeing your work!
I discovered that in the latest version of netfabb we can export mesh as AMF (as well as stl and other formats as before)
AMF file format...has a big challenge right now and so does the world using it. The files are ASCII, not binary and base don XML-like syntax. These need to change like yesterday! Kraftwurx is working on implementation with an binary encoder to get the file sizes way smaller! We're also embedding texture information within the file itself with metadata about the material and other secret stuff :-)