Is it a good approach to use Unity 3D for my 3D-printing project?

Unity Engine
1

I am going to work on a final year project of Computer Science. I would like to develop an app for 3d printing. My idea is like this:

purpose: let users to design their own phone cases platform: Android

After the users open the app, a 3D template of Phone Case is displayed on the screen(slowly rotating).

Users can customize the following features: Size(for different sizes of phone)、colors、patterns(allow inserting a 2d logo). After they change a pattern/color, the 3D display will change accordingly.

Moreover, the phone case is not a typical one, it can have a flip out hook/kickstand. The hook/stand is snapped into place, so that it wont be opened by themselves when it is not in use. Therefore, my app needs to automatically divide the phone case into several components(maybe 4-5, now not sure) after users have customized their own phone cases. The divided components each have joints which allow them to be combined manually to form a phone case.

After obtaining different components, these components will be exported as .STL format, thus 3D printer can use these STL files to perform 3D printing.

Since I am not familiar with Unity 3D, I only know it is convenient for developing 3d games. So is it a good approach to use Unity 3D for my 3D-printing project?

2

For the visual side, yes. That will get you started a lot quicker. The other big advantage comes if you want to publish to different platforms. (For example make an Android App out of it.) Just getting realtime shadows programmed from scratch can be a lot of work. Those things are just there in Unity.

Other parts like splitting models and exporting to STL format will probably require some programming, but I assume you are used to that. You have various options when it comes to programming in Unity, but for me C# is the language of choice. You’ll of course have the Unity api available, but also the entire .net api. It’s not the latest version of C# that is supported, but partial classes, generics, they are all available. So all in all it’s a serious programming environment.