OpenFab: a programmable pipeline for multimaterial fabrication

Abstract

3D printing hardware is rapidly scaling up to output continuous mixtures of multiple materials at increasing resolution over ever larger print volumes. This poses an enormous computational challenge: large high-resolution prints comprise trillions of voxels and petabytes of data, and modeling and describing the input with spatially varying material mixtures at this scale are simply challenging. Existing 3D printing software is insufficient; in particular, most software is designed to support only a few million primitives, with discrete material choices per object. We present OpenFab, a programmable pipeline for synthesis of multimaterial 3D printed objects that is inspired by RenderMan and modern GPU pipelines. The pipeline supports procedural evaluation of geometric detail and material composition, using shader-like fablets, allowing models to be specified easily and efficiently. The pipeline is implemented in a streaming fashion: only a small fraction of the final volume is stored in memory, and output is fed to the printer with a little startup delay. We demonstrate it on a variety of multimaterial objects.

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Document management and text processing

    • Document capture

      • Graphics recognition and interpretation

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Shape modeling

      • Parametric curve and surface models

      • Volumetric models