Support-Free Hollowing for 3D Printing via Voronoi Diagram of Ellipses

TL;DR

This paper introduces a support-free hollowing technique for 3D printing that uses Voronoi diagrams of ellipses to eliminate the need for internal support structures, enabling efficient fabrication of complex interior designs.

Contribution

It presents a novel method for support-free elliptic hollowing in 3D shapes using Voronoi diagrams of ellipses, improving printability and design flexibility.

Findings

Successfully generates support-free interior designs for 3D printing.

Demonstrates the method's effectiveness on various 3D shapes.

Enables fabrication without internal support structures.

Abstract

Recent work has demonstrated that the interior material layout of a 3D model can be designed to make a fabricated replica satisfy application-specific demands on its physical properties such as resistance to external loads. A widely used practice to fabricate such models is by layer-based additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing, which however suffers from the problem of adding and removing interior supporting structures. In this paper, we present a novel method for generating support-free elliptic hollowing for 3D shapes which can entirely avoid additional supporting structures. To achieve this, we perform the ellipse hollowing in the polygons on parallel section planes and protrude the ellipses of one plane to its neighboring planes. To pack the ellipses in a polygon, we construct the Voronoi diagram of ellipses to efficiently reason the free-space around the ellipses and other geometric features by taking advantage of the available algorithm for the efficient and robust construction of the Voronoi diagram of circles. We demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposed method by generating interior designs for and printing various 3D shapes.