Dental Lab QA

Check a restoration before it costs a blank, a print or a chair appointment. Drop a crown, bridge, abutment or model as STL, PLY, 3MF or OBJ — or as STEP/IGES straight from a CAD kernel — and run the mesh through the same validation a slicer would: watertight or not, open edges, non-manifold edges, degenerate triangles, and a hole overlay that shows you where. A design that fails these fails in the machine rather than on screen. MEASUREMENTS ARE IN MILLIMETRES: imports keep their native coordinates and the measure tool is set to mm, so margin width, occlusal reduction and connector height read directly, with area and path modes for anything that is not a straight line. Section planes cut every mesh at once, which is how you check a wall at the exact place you care about instead of trusting a sampled average. WALL THICKNESS, HONESTLY: the thickness check fires rays from face centroids to the opposite surface and tints anything thin, but it SAMPLES — the raycast total is capped and it strides through triangles, so it finds thin regions and does not prove a minimum. Its threshold is derived from the base value as thin below 2x and marginal below 3x, which is FDM nozzle vocabulary reused here: to flag a 0.8 mm minimum wall, set the base to 0.4. Read the result as a map of where to look, then measure that spot by hand. THE PRESETS ARE NOT DENTAL. The printer list is Prusa, Bambu, Ender, Voron, Ultimaker, Formlabs and Elegoo; the material list is PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA, TPU, nylon, PC, carbon-filled PLA and two generic resins. There is no zirconia, no lithium disilicate, no PMMA and no cast alloy, so the cost and mass estimate is correct arithmetic over the wrong density — use it for a printed model or a try-in, not to price a milled unit. Volume and surface area from the quantity report are material-independent and are the numbers to carry into your own costing. Orientation tools — lay flat, auto-orient over trial rotations, centre, and a build-plate fit check — plus STL/3MF export target a printed model or surgical guide. CLEARANCE AGAINST THE OPPOSING SURFACE: drop the restoration and the antagonist (or the prep die) and the clearance map paints every vertex of the first by its nearest distance to the second. Positive is a gap, negative means the two interpenetrate — so occlusal interference is the negative end of the ramp, and the readout gives the contact area alongside the range. That area is a vertex-gated face sum: a triangle straddling the threshold is dropped whole, so it under-reads on a coarse mesh, which is the safe direction for a report somebody adjusts a crown from. The query is synchronous and refuses above 250,000 vertices rather than freezing the tab — decimate a full-arch scan, or compare the quadrant you care about. THE CHECK PRINTS. A PDF printability report carries the validation per mesh — watertight or not, open edges, non-manifold edges, degenerate triangles — alongside the build-plate fit, the material-and-time estimate and the quote line by line with the rate card behind each rate, so a design that fails leaves the lab as one attachment rather than a screenshot. THE CLEARANCE MAP PRINTS TOO: a deviation report gives the two surfaces compared, the range, the mean and the contact area, and states in writing that it carries no pass or fail. NOT HERE: margin-line detection, and CAM toolpaths, which are the milling plate's job.

Supported file formats: STL, PLY, OBJ, 3MF, GLB, GLTF, STEP, STP, IGES, IGS