Exporting to more than 20 countries in the world, .MGX operates both as a supplier of manufacturing excellence and a design company mastering its own concepts and brand. Apart from its in-house products, it provides solutions in all types of fields such as design, art, architecture, interiors, fashion, beauty and cosmetics. Part of the Materialise group – a worldwide leader in rapid prototyping services, founded in 1990 by Msc. MBA Wilfried Vancraen in a joint venture with the University of Leuven - .MGX was created in 2003 to strategically broaden the firm’s expertise beyond medicine, dentistry and the automotive industry into the world of design. With its new division, Materialise has brought about a real revolution in innovative product development by giving designers the opportunity to access new information and global digital tools. ‘Materialise.MGX’ is confidently going beyond tooling and digital CAD software by com- bining art and technology with its extensive 15 years of experience in the high-tech area of 3D printing techniques, the most popular of which include: stereolithography (SLA), selective laser sintering (SLS), and fused deposition modeling (FDM).

 

The name .MGX comes from the file extension of the Materialise software, Magics. This software makes the rapid proto- typing and manufacturing techniques accessible to professionals. The highly contemporary CAD file (made by today’s leading design software packages such as Rhino, 3dStudioMax, Maya, Microstation, Cinema4d, Solid Works, and more) can be transformed into an STL-file and then converted by Magics into .MGX in order to render the design project print- able. Magics is a market leader in pre-press software, interfacing between product design and 3D printer. The application includes analysing parts, making process related design changes, optimising *.STL models and designing fixtures, as well as ‘finite element analysis’ and other tools. Magics, for those who are unfamiliar with rapid prototyping technologies, can be compared with the process of inkjet printing. Instead of spraying a text by inkjet, this technology allows the laying, or consolidating of 3D layer over layer (slice over slice) in a vessel of liquid polymer, in the case of stereolithography (SLA), or in a vessel of powder for selective laser sintering (SLS). The various Rapid Manufacturing techniques today use different construction methods but the principle shared by them all is additive fabrication - transforming material from one state to another (liquid to solid or welding of material particles by laser beam). The process of polymerising when struck by a laser beam is made possible in the cases of SLA and SLS by the photosensitivity of the polymer. Therefore, with the Magics production software developed by Materialise and thanks to 3D printing technologies, it has become feasible to translate 3D visual images into sustainable 3D material structures. Since 2003, this technology has created for the first time great novelty in lifestyle and interior design. As evidence of international recognition, Material Connexion in New York selected the Selective Laser Sintering process for inclusion in its Material Archives as ‘Innovation Excellence’.