Adobe Enters 3D Printing Patent Fray With New Smoothing Process

Adobe Systems Inc. filed a patent in September that has now been published online, deepening their participation in the 3D printing arena. Following last year's announcements of partnerships with Sculpteo and Bitoni, as well as enhanced 3D printing features in Photoshop software, Adobe's patent, authored by Radomir Mech, "describes techniques and apparatuses for smooth 3D printing using multi-stage filaments." Applicable to FDM technology, the process described in the patent aims to reduce the look of "stepping" that can be common with that process. Read more about the plan in the full article: http://3dprint.com/56862/adobe-patent-smooth-fdm/


Below is a look at "stepping" on an object created via FDM 3D printing:
http://www.deelip.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/16.jpg

They're trying to patent what Nick Stewart (among others in the RepRap community) has been working on for a few years now (and has been having some success lately). Someone ought to tell him so he can send the patent office his prior art to make sure they're not stealing his work.

Edit: Oh wait, I knew this sounded familiar. TopoLabs had a patent pending on this same concept almost exactly a year ago... You even did a story on it.

I personally don't have any prior art prior to the filing date. However, they are looking at mostly planar layers with just a nonplanar skin. I want all the layers to be nonplanar. They also talk about a way to minimize artifacts by interleaving adjacent layers. While that is a neat trick that is not needed with 100% nonplanar layers. Bottomline: it suck that Adobe did this (although understandable) and patents suck in general but they won't stop me legally from doing what I want to do. The idea that a company can patent a capability of my 3D printer is crazy to me. They essentially came into house and stole part of my machines. I know that I can still do what they patented in private but I can not share software that does that. Arg.