Fab trees for designing complex 3D printable materials

With more 3D printable materials being invented, 3D printers nowadays could replicate not only geometries, but also appearance and physical properties. On the software side, the tight coupling between geometry and material specification, and the lack of tools in specifying materials volumetrically, however, hinder the full usage of the multi-material capability of 3D printers. The heavy dependency on traditional modeling software also makes casual users, who are becoming one of the most important user groups, unwelcome in this rising area. This thesis aims to solve the above problems by proposing fab trees for creating and combining procedural material specifications defined in OpenFL, a language for fabrication similar to the shading language for rendering. The fab tree representation allows users 1) to decouple material specification from geometry; hence, to be able to reuse the created materials on different models; 2) to easily create complicated materials systematically; 3) to have enough freedom to design materials procedurally, and fully utilize the functionality of today's multi-material 3D printers. In addition, I provide a fully functional user interface to explore desired visualization methods and user interactions for casual users in the 3D printing context.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Wang, Ye, M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Wojciech Matusik.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/85798

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/85798