Growing and Evolving 3D Prints

TL;DR

This paper introduces a biologically-inspired developmental model that generates complex, printable 3D objects directly through evolutionary algorithms, optimizing for aesthetics and printability without manual intervention.

Contribution

It presents a novel generative system that produces 3D printable objects directly from local cell interactions, eliminating intermediate steps common in traditional methods.

Findings

Evolving for aesthetic complexity followed by structural refinement yields optimal printable forms.

The system successfully generates diverse 3D printable objects with varying structural and aesthetic qualities.

Fitness measures effectively guide the evolution towards printable and aesthetically interesting forms.

Abstract

Design - especially of physical objects - can be understood as creative acts solving practical problems. In this paper we describe a biologically-inspired developmental model as the basis of a generative form-finding system. Using local interactions between cells in a two-dimensional environment, then capturing the state of the system at every time step, complex three-dimensional (3D) forms can be generated by the system. Unlike previous systems, our method is capable of directly producing 3D printable objects, eliminating intermediate transformations and manual manipulation often necessary to ensure the 3D form is printable. We devise fitness measures for optimising 3D printability and aesthetic complexity and use a Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolutionary Strategies algorithm (CMA-ES) to find 3D forms that are both aesthetically interesting and physically printable using fused deposition modelling printing techniques. We investigate the system's capabilities by evolving and 3D printing objects at different levels of structural consistency, and assess the quality of the fitness measures presented to explore the design space of our generative system. We find that by evolving first for aesthetic complexity, then evolving for structural consistency until the form is 'just printable', gives the best results.