Rapid prototyping technology is used in a great number of industries, starting from medicine and ending in machine engineering. It is the creation of a real shaped three-dimensional prototyping model of this or that merchandize that is going to be released to the market. The process of rapid prototyping is a very important one, as it helps to carry out a kind of a social pole, concerning the potential popularity of the product in the market. The process also helps to find out all possible pluses and minuses of the future product, which helps to shorten the number of defective goods in production.
The RP process is multistage. The first stage of the process is the creation of the drawing or a sketch of the product under rapid prototyping modeling. This stage is usually carried out on paper, drawing board or a whatman paper. Special equipment is used to project an image onto a multimedia screen. The designers and producers of the product usually discuss the project before its approving. Such programs are used in medicine to project the model of a skull or a face when it comes to a plastic surgery, for example. A desirable effect is shown on a special screen, including all surgery stages. The computer programs used with this purpose are nothing more than three-dimension graphical applications capable of creating 3D model of any real object. These programs help to avoid risky situations possible during operations.
The second stage is numerical processing of the sketched information. Painted models of future rapid prototypes are processed by computers creating 3D models, which are later used as a basis for the actual prototyping process.
The next and the last stage of rapid prototyping is the machine prototyping. This process is very unusual and deserves to be described. To begin with, the process of machine prototyping could be impossible without CAD

Tags: prototyping, rapid prototype