Digital smile design is not a filter and not a rendering of somebody else's teeth. It starts with photographs and video of your own face — at rest, speaking, smiling — combined with a 3D scan of your teeth, a scan of your face and a CBCT — all in the same practice.
From that, the finished result is designed: tooth proportion, the line the edges follow, how much shows when you speak, how the gum sits. It is judged against your face, not against a template.
Then it leaves the screen. The design is printed or milled and placed over your own teeth as a mock-up you can wear out of the clinic. That is the point at which things get changed — while changing them costs nothing.
A standardised set: full face, retracted, lateral, close-up, plus video of you speaking and smiling naturally.
Intraoral scan, face scan and CBCT — all three here, in the same appointment, merged into one model.
Proportion, edge line, display, gum contour — all decided against your face, and reviewed with you on screen.
The design placed over your own teeth. You wear it, photograph it, and tell us what to change before anything is permanent.
The design is made in one of two environments, depending on what the case asks for. One lives beside the chair, in the same data flow as the intraoral scan. The other lives in the cloud, works in three dimensions against a library of natural anatomy, and opens the case up to the laboratory.
The same rule holds in both: whatever is approved on screen is tried in the mouth first, as a provisional restoration. The screen is the plan. The mock-up is the decision.
Part of the 3Shape ecosystem, in the same flow as the TRIOS intraoral scanner and the 3Shape Unite platform. The design is built on a photograph of your face, with the scan of your teeth aligned to it, and tooth shapes chosen from a smile library and then adjusted.
A cloud platform built on a library of real dental anatomy: the design is not drawn from nothing, it is matched to your face by choosing among thousands of natural tooth shapes. The 3DNA generation takes that design into three dimensions.
| Capture | What it gives | Where it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Photography and video | Facial proportion, smile line, how much shows when you speak | Both platforms — it is the basis of every design |
| Intraoral scan | Your teeth and gums as they are today, in three dimensions | 3Shape: aligned to the photograph · Smilecloud: becomes the working model |
| Face scan | Your face in three dimensions — not a flat photograph | Smilecloud 3DNA: the design is judged on the face, not beside it |
| CBCT | Bone, roots, implant position and the space available | Smilecloud 3DNA (Blueprint) and guided surgery |
| Jaw motion | How your jaw closes and how it moves | Smilecloud 3DNA — so the smile is designed for how it works |
The platform is chosen case by case. For a single veneer or an anterior segment, chairside design is enough. For a full-mouth reconstruction, a change in vertical dimension or implant prosthetics, the design starts in three dimensions.