Chopper: Partitioning models into 3D-printable parts
Author(s)
Luo, Linjie; Baran, Ilya; Rusinkiewicz, Szymon; Matusik, Wojciech
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3D printing technology is rapidly maturing and becoming ubiquitous. One of the remaining obstacles to wide-scale adoption is that the object to be printed must fit into the working volume of the 3D printer. We propose a framework, called Chopper, to decompose a large 3D object into smaller parts so that each part fits into the printing volume. These parts can then be assembled to form the original object. We formulate a number of desirable criteria for the partition, including assemblability, having few components, unobtrusiveness of the seams, and structural soundness. Chopper optimizes these criteria and generates a partition either automatically or with user guidance. Our prototype outputs the final decomposed parts with customized connectors on the interfaces. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Chopper on a variety of non-trivial real-world objects.
Date issued
2012-11Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
ACM Transactions on Graphics
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Linjie Luo, Ilya Baran, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, and Wojciech Matusik. 2012. Chopper: partitioning models into 3D-printable parts. ACM Trans. Graph. 31, 6, Article 129 (November 2012), 9 pages.
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISSN
07300301