We introduce a novel technique to automatically decompose an input object’s volume into a set of parts that can be represented by two opposite height fields. Such decomposition enables the manufacturing of individual parts using two-piece reusable rigid molds. Our decomposition strategy relies on a new energy formulation that utilizes a pre-computed signal on the mesh volume representing the accessibility for a predefined set of extraction directions. Thanks to this novel formulation, our method allows for efficient optimization of a fabrication-aware partitioning of volumes in a completely automatic way. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by generating valid volume partitionings for a wide range of complex objects and physically reproducing several of them.
@article{alderighi2021volume,
author = {Alderighi, Thomas and Malomo, Luigi and Bickel, Bernd and Cignoni, Paolo and Pietroni, Nico},
title = {Volume decomposition for two-piece rigid casting},
journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)},
number = {6},
volume = {40},
year = {2021},
publisher = {ACM}
}
The authors thank Marco Callieri for all his precious help with the resin casts. The models used in the paper are courtesy of the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository, the AIM@SHAPE Shape Repository, and Thingi10K Repository. The research was partially funded by the European Research Council (ERC) MATERIALIZABLE: Intelligent fabrication-oriented computational design and modeling (grant no. 715767).