Volume decomposition for two-piece rigid casting

Publication

ACM Transactions on Graphics 40(6) (SIGGRAPH Asia 2021)

Abstract

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.

Resources

• Paper (102 MB)
• Submission Video (120 MB)

Video Presentation (19 min)

Submission Video

Citation

@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}
}

Acknowledgements

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).