Blue Sky Plan Manual

Once you are satisfied with the target positions of the teeth, use the "Continue to Edit Steps" button to generate intermediate positions and move to the next planning step. The table in the "Orthodontics" panel lists the number of necessary intermediate steps to reach the planned target position of the active tooth. The number of steps is always the same for all the teeth, but it is possible to start the movement of teeth in later steps. The first and last row in the table represent the initial and target position of the active tooth, so these positions are locked and cannot be changed at this planning stage. The number of steps is estimated automatically based on the pre-defined settings of maximum movement limitations. The default movement limitations are stored in the application Preferences and can be adjusted manually.

The slider at the top of the "Orthodontics" panel (2) allows you to move teeth over time and in intermediate steps. If the slider is moved to the left, the teeth are visualised at the initial positions. The very right position of the slider represents the planned target positions. By dragging the slider, you can animate the movement of the teeth through intermediate steps over time. Further, you can move the slider to one of the interim steps and, if needed, adjust the position of the active tooth in this concrete step to prevent collisions with its neighbouring teeth. The movement of an active tooth is illustrated by a green color in the table. Milestones are depicted in red. Orange rows are milestones with changes with respect to the previous step. The row selected by the user is marked blue. In the table, there are two columns of checkboxes. It may be important to start the movement of the active tooth later in a step. The starting step can be changed by checking the checkbox in the left column ("Start Step")(3). After any change, it is necessary to regenerate the entire table by clicking the "Refresh Steps" button (7). The checkboxes in the right column ("Mandatory")(4) can be used to lock the intermediate positions of the tooth – the tooth always moves through the locked intermediate positions.

Three optional plans for organizing teeth movement are available – "Least movement move last", "Least movement move first" and "Uniform movement". "Inter Tooth Sequencing" (5) moves all teeth with respect to each other, while "Intra Tooth Sequencing" (6) is related to the rotation and translation movement for individual teeth. It is also possible to set Intra Tooth Sequencing by right clicking on the tooth. The movement of all teeth can be postponed in one step by clicking the "Duplicate steps" button (8). The details about each tooth movement within the specific step can be found in "Step Details" (9). For an illustration of teeth movement in each individual step use "Open Movement Chart". If necessary, each adjusted plan can be reset to the default one (10). The movement speed of each tooth can be changed by right clicking on the tooth. Decreasing speed will slow down tooth movement by 65%, while increasing speed will accelerate tooth movement by 65%. Resetting the speed will return the tooth movement speed to the original values. Note, that any change of tooth movement speed will also affect the number of intermediary steps in the table. In the Aligners planning type, it is necessary, at the end of this step, to select which method of creating aligners will be used further on. For the generation and export of model intermediate positions only, the default selection "Export Models Only" is sufficient. By selecting the "Design Printable Aligners" option, the aligners will be drawn and generated directly as models in BSP, which can later be exported. Selecting "Design Aligner Trim Curve" means that the trimline, applicable to the mining machine, will be drawn on the models and exported. It's very helpful for automatic aligner trimming. If attachments are meant to be added on model intermediate positions, it is necessary to check the "Add Attachments" as well. Doing that will add this step to the rest of the process.

The "Export Video" button (1) allows the user to export video content of teeth movement. A couple of interesting functions can be set in this option. Note that by default, the size of the video is given by the size of the 3D scene window. In some cases, this can produce large videos (e.g. on 4k monitors), which some video players may have issues with. To prevent these issues, you can limit the size of the video by choosing the "HD" or "Full HD" limit in the "Video size" option. Alternatively, you can install a different video player (e.g. the VLC media player) which can handle large videos.