The STL or Stereolithography format, established by 3D systems, gathers the geometric data of the model in a number of triangular surfaces. It can be in ASCII or binary format, and is a de facto standard in the Rapid Prototyping (RP) world. RP has developed greatly over the last ten years. In particular, improvement in materials has meant greater part accuracy and strength, which in turn has increased the range of functional applications. Future applications of RP will focus on rapid tooling and direct manufacturing. Direct manufacturing in particular may see much benefit from the incorporation of color into models. For color RP, besides designing new hardware to add color into the prototypes, it is necessary to redefine the CAD software for adding and accurately positioning color onto the model. STL cannot effectively store this kind of information. Among the existing data file formats, VRML is an acceptable one that is complimentary to existing RP processes. This paper acts as a review to discuss several methods of using VRML for coloring model data. This paper will also discuss the problems occurred in coloring the layer contours of the RP model.

This paper presents a triangular-to-quadrilateral mesh conversion method that can control the directionality of the output quadrilateral mesh according to a user-specified vector field. Given a triangular mesh and a vector field, the method first scores all possible quadrilaterals that can be formed by pairs of adjacent triangles, according to their shape and directionality. It then converts the pairs into quadrilateral elements in order of the scores to form a quadrilateral mesh. Engineering analyses with finite element methods occasionally require a quadrilateral mesh well aligned along the boundary geometry or the directionality of some physical phenomena, such as in the directions of a streamline, shock boundary, or force propagation vectors. The mesh conversion method can control the mesh directionality according to any desired vector fields, and the method can be used with any existing triangular mesh generators.

In this paper, a new technique of space deformation for parametric surfaces with so-called extension function (EF) is presented. Firstly, a special extension function is introduced. Then an operator matrix is constructed on the basis of EF. Finally the deformation of a surface is achieved through multiplying the equation of the surface by an operator matrix or adding the multiplication of some vector and the operator matrix to the equation. Interactively modifying control parameters, ideal deformation effect can be got. The implementation shows that the method is simple, intuitive and easy to control. It can be used in such fields as geometric modeling and computer animation.