Case Study: Leading Shoe Manufacturer achieves 80% faster texturing and massive file-size reduction with Materialise

Texturing 453 Surfaces of a Shoe Sole Discover Texturing

Leading Shoe Manufacturer faced a bottleneck turning CAD designs into textured 3D‑printed masters for casting: manually assigning textures across hundreds of surface areas was extremely time‑consuming and produced massive STL files that were hard to handle. Materialise stepped in with its software suite — including 3-matic for texturing, Magics for data prep and positioning, e‑Stage for automated supports, and the Build Processor for slice‑based output — to address both workflow and file‑size challenges.

Materialise grouped like surfaces to texture 453 regions in one operation (via 3‑matic), hollowed the model and added drainage holes with Magics, auto‑generated supports with e‑Stage (saving up to about 20 minutes per part), and used slice‑based processing to avoid huge STLs (producing a 5.8 MB STL and a 50 MB slice stack instead of an ~2 GB file). The result was a ready‑to‑cast, highly detailed textured master with an estimated 80% time savings on texturing, reduced finishing from minimal contact points, and far smaller, more manageable data files — all delivered by Materialise.