Freely orientable microstructures for designing deformable 3D prints

Thibault Tricard, Vincent Tavernier, Cédric Zanni, Jonàs Martínez, Pierre-Alexandre Hugron, Fabrice Neyret, Sylvain Lefebvre

ACM Siggraph Asia

HAL DOI

Abstract

Nature offers a marvel of astonishing and rich deformation behaviors. Yet, most of the objects we fabricate are comparatively rather inexpressive, either rigid or having simple homogeneous behaviors when interacted with. In this work, we focus on controlling how a 3D printed volume reacts under large deformations. We propose a novel microstructure that is extremely rigid along a transverse direction, while being comparatively very flexible in the orthogonal plane. By allowing free gradation of orientation within the object, the microstructure can be designed such that, under deformation, some distances in the volume are preserved while others freely change. This allows to control the way the volume reshapes when deformed, and results in a wide range of design possibilities. Other gradations are possible, such as locally and progressively canceling the directional effect. To synthesize the structures we propose an algorithm that builds upon procedural texturing. It produces a cellular geometry that can be fabricated reliably despite 3D printing walls at a minimal thickness, for maximal flexibility. The synthesis algorithm is efficient, and scales to large volumes.

Example code

Shadertoys:

https://www.shadertoy.com/view/WtjfzW

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