Fab trees for designing complex 3D printable materials

Abstract

With more 3D printable materials being invented, 3D printers nowadays could replicate not only geometries, but also appearance and physical properties. On the software side, the tight coupling between geometry and material specification, and the lack of tools in specifying materials volumetrically, however, hinder the full usage of the multi-material capability of 3D printers. The heavy dependency on traditional modeling software also makes casual users, who are becoming one of the most important user groups, unwelcome in this rising area. This thesis aims to solve the above problems by proposing fab trees for creating and combining procedural material specifications defined in OpenFL, a language for fabrication similar to the shading language for rendering. The fab tree representation allows users 1) to decouple material specification from geometry; hence, to be able to reuse the created materials on different models; 2) to easily create complicated materials systematically; 3) to have enough freedom to design materials procedurally, and fully utilize the functionality of today's multi-material 3D printers. In addition, I provide a fully functional user interface to explore desired visualization methods and user interactions for casual users in the 3D printing context.