ACM Reference Format
Lu, L., Sharf, A., Zhao, H., Wei, Y., Fan, Q., Chen, X., Savoye, Y., Tu, C., Cohen-Or, D., Chen, B. 2014.
Build-to-Last: Strength to Weight 3D Printed Objects. ACM Trans. Graph. 33, 4, Article 97 (July 2014), 10
pages. DOI = 10.1145/2601097.2601168 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2601097.2601168.
Copyright Notice
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted
without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profi t or commercial advantage and that
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the fi rst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned
by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish,
to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifi c permission and/or a fee. Request permis-
sions from permissions@acm.org.
Copyright © ACM 0730-0301/14/07-ART97 $15.00.
DOI: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2601097.2601168
Build-to-Last: Strength to Weight 3D Printed Objects
Lin Lu
1∗
Andrei Sharf
2
Haisen Zhao
1
Yuan Wei
1
Qingnan Fan
1
Xuelin Chen
1
Yann Savoye
2
Changhe Tu
1
Daniel Cohen-Or
3
Baoquan Chen
1†
1
Shandong University
2
Ben-Gurion University
3
Tel Aviv University
Figure 1: We reduce the material of a 3D kitten (left), by carving porous in the solid (mid-left), to yield a honeycomb-like interior structure
which provides an optimal strength-to-weight ratio, and relieves the overall stress illustrated on a cross-section (mid-right). The 3D printed
hollowed solid is built-to-last using our interior structure (right).
Abstract
The emergence of low-cost 3D printers steers the investigation of
new geometric problems that control the quality of the fabricated
object. In this paper, we present a method to reduce the material
cost and weight of a given object while providing a durable printed
model that is resistant to impact and external forces.
We introduce a hollowing optimization algorithm based on the
concept of honeycomb-cells structure. Honeycombs structures are
known to be of minimal material cost while providing strength
in tension. We utilize the Voronoi diagram to compute irregular
honeycomb-like volume tessellations which define the inner struc-
ture. We formulate our problem as a strength–to–weight optimiza-
tion and cast it as mutually finding an optimal interior tessellation
and its maximal hollowing subject to relieve the interior stress.
Thus, our system allows to build-to-last 3D printed objects with
large control over their strength-to-weight ratio and easily model
various interior structures. We demonstrate our method on a col-
lection of 3D objects from different categories. Furthermore, we
evaluate our method by printing our hollowed models and measure
their stress and weights.
CR Categories: I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Ge-
ometry and Object Modeling—Curve, surface, solid, and object
representations;
Keywords: 3D printing technologies, solid object hollowing,
porous structure design, volume-Voronoi shape
∗
e-mail:lulin.linda@gmail.com
†
e-mail:baoquan.chen@gmail.com
Links: DL PDF
1 Introduction
Recent years have seen a growing interest in 3D printing technolo-
gies, capable of generating tangible solid objects from their digital
representation. Typically, physically printed objects are built by
successively stacking cross-section layers of powder-based mate-
rial. Layers are generated through fused-deposition modeling and
liquid polymer jetting. Hence, the production cost of the result-
ing model is directly related to the volume of material effectively
employed in the printing process. In turn, this can be a costly oper-
ation for large and complex models. To mitigate this, few methods
have recently focused on the problem of designing cost effective
3D shapes by reducing their interior material. In their recent work,
Wang et al. [2013] introduce one of the first cost-effective printing
strategies using skin frame structures to support the shape’s interior.
Recent material-aware 3D printing techniques [Stava et al. 2012;
Pr
´
evost et al. 2013; Zhou et al. 2013; Umetani and Schmidt 2013]
describe object breakability, stress and fatigue-related collision as
challenging issues that are very important to handle for 3D printing.
Our work draws inspiration from the Voronoi structure. Given a
ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 33, No. 4, Article 97, Publication Date: July 2014