ABSTRACT
Dental prostheses fabrication including coping, crown, bridge, and fixture, is greatly depending on the skills of dentists and technicians. Fortuitously, RP techniques are becoming an alternative approach to fabricate patterns for dental crowns and implant structures using RP technology. The traditional prosthesis fabrication process involves much handwork by dentists and dental technicians. The reason is that there was no available image data to construct CAD models for practical prostheses, or a CAD model could not be constructed due to the complexity of the prosthesis. The fabrication
of dental prostheses is also a problem, because practical dental restorations often include freeform surfaces (especially crowns). Moreover, bridges and implant structures tend to have features such as overhangs, undercuts, sharp corners, etc.
