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.
