AddUp Partners With INRIA And Releases A New Version Of The AddUp Trajectory Generator

AddUp Trajectory Generator is a fast slice & toolpath generator. Since its unveiling at Formnext 2019, it has become the new standard for AddUp FormUp machine users.

With over 3500 researchers and engineers, Inria is the French national research institute for digital science and technology. It is a leading reference institute in this field. AddUp partnered with the Inria computer graphics experts behind IceSL, a highly efficient hybrid CPU-GPU slicer. Together they developed and integrated advanced algorithms that bring unprecedented slicing & tool pathing performance into AddUp Trajectory Generator.

“The slicing & scanning trajectory computation speed is around 1000x the build speed of these trajectories. When you consider the time spent by engineers, simply waiting for computing to be done, this is a real game changer.” precises Damien ARTIGNAN, Assistant Head of Industrial Software Department, at AddUp.

These performances are achieved through innovative algorithms and efficient parallelization on multi-core CPUs. Computing on CPUs can seem antiquated when the hype is about GPU computing, but CPUs bring unique and crucial advantages.

“PBF toolpath generation produces a lot of data that must be sent to scanners or be saved to files. This leads to many I/O between RAM and VRAM that add a processing time to the pure GPU computing time, having a low net gain. In addition, maintainability and evolutivity are simpler on CPUs. Finally, the CPU approach does not require specific vendor hardware.” says Guillaume PASCAL, AddUp Manager Product Owner.

In addition, slicing performance scales naturally with the number of CPU cores: from home laptops to many-core desktop CPUs, the slicer makes the best use of the target platform capabilities.

The new version of AddUp Trajectory Generator now offers smooth up skins & down skins generation, to obtain an unprecedented part surface quality. This new feature strengthens the existing list of operators available for visual strategy trees, a unique approach for AM strategy creation.

“Thanks to the visual strategy tree definition, unlimited combinations of operators and parameters are given to our users, while no programming skills are needed. With such a rapid learning curve, our customers can be focused on production from day one,” explains Mathieu ROCHE, Software Product Manager, at AddUp.

AddUp Additive Trajectory Generator is included in AddUp Manager™ 2021, at no extra cost.