“…It is poised to bring about a revolution in the way products are designed, manufactured and distributed to end users (Gao et al, 2015). Although the details of AM processes vary from each other, the three-dimensional (3D) model is sliced into a set of 2.5D layered contours along the building direction in all processes (Xu et al, 2018a(Xu et al, , 2018bYuan et al, 2018;Liu et al, 2003;Kumbhar et al, 2008;Oropallo et al, 2018). The procedure of 3D printing mainly consists of the following four major steps: 1 Choosing the building direction, which can be constant or adaptive; 2 Slicing, including uniform slicing and adaptive slicing; 3 Generating contours for each layer; and 4 Adding support structure if necessary (Minetto et al, 2017).…”