You might be familiar with "Meshmixer the mesh fixer" or "Meshmixer the 3D printing utility". But we haven't stopped there. As Meshmixer evolves, we are adding a powerful suite of 3D design tools that don't exist in any other CAD software. With these new workflows, Meshmixer can help you take advantage of the design freedom that 3D Printing has unlocked.

Optimize Inefficient Parts

Meshmixer includes a suite of tools to help you evolve your existing CAD designs into parts that are optimized for 3D printing. You can light-weight with 3D Patterns, create interior cavities with Hollow, or use our variational Smoothing to melt away unwanted mass. See the video below for an example, where we reduce the weight of a bracket design by up to 50%. This isn't an expensive offline computation - it can happen in realtime as you drag a slider.

Create Connections

Designing parts that fit other parts can be a huge challenge in traditional CAD. Meshmixer has a suite of tools specifically designed to help with this problem. In the video below, we use our Offset tool to create a shoulder plate that fits a 3D body scan. Next our Join tool (think "magic auto-Loft") stitches together the camera clip and the shoulder plate. Finally Soft Transform smoothly deforms the joinery as we re-point the camera. Other tools like Align and Attract make it dead-simple to adapt your existing designs to "fit" onto something else.

Enhance Existing Objects

Iterating is easy in the computer, but it can be a challenge if you are working with real objects. Meshmixer can help you design 3D-printable add-ons to explore design variations. Even if all you have is a smartphone, 123D Catch and Memento can bring your parts into the virtual world. Watch below as we design a clip-on base that helps a compact driver to stand upright.

Design Multi-Material Assemblies

3D Printers make it possible to manufacture objects in which different materials are printed simultaneously. We are taking the first tentative steps towards multi-material design with our Complex objects. In Meshmixer a Complex is a single object that contains a decomposition into sub-regions. You can design and edit Complexes, and even automatically generate a Complex by marking regions on the object surface. In the video below we use this new workflow to design a multi-material screwdriver handle from scratch inside Meshmixer.