Layers of Fun (2024)

Layers of Fun – Democratising multi-material Polyjet 3D printing through procedural systems (2024)

Evan Vallender

Recent advances in 3D printing have opened up exciting new possibilities with a technology known as voxel-based printing. To understand this in simpler terms, think of a voxel as a tiny building block, much like a pixel in a digital image but in 3D. Just like how pixels combine to form a digital picture, voxels come together to create complex 3D objects. The real breakthrough with voxel-based printing is its ability to offer extremely precise control over how materials are deposited, layer by layer. This allows for intricate designs and objects with unique internal properties, which traditional 3D printing methods can’t easily achieve.

However, despite the progress in voxel printing, the software we use to design these 3D objects—known as CAD (Computer-Aided Design)—hasn’t caught up. CAD tools were originally built for more straightforward 3D modeling, where an object is defined by its outer surface. But voxel printing requires much more detail than just an outer shell; it needs to account for what’s inside the object as well. This gap creates a situation where designers first create a basic model using traditional 3D design techniques and only afterward do they go back and add the voxel-specific details. This process slows things down and prevents designers from taking full advantage of voxel printing’s potential right from the start.

This research aims to fix that disconnect by exploring an older but powerful modeling technique called “metaball-based modeling.” Metaballs are essentially blobs or spheres that combine and morph into shapes based on how close they are to each other. They create smooth, organic-looking shapes and can be used to model objects in 3D space. What makes metaballs interesting for voxel printing is that they generate what are called “weight fields.” These weight fields can control different parameters in the design, such as the density of material or how flexible certain parts of the object are. This allows designers to manipulate not just the outer form of the object but its internal structure as well, right from the design stage. One challenge, though, is that there’s no widely available software designed specifically for this type of volumetric modeling. So, designers have to use a rather complicated and unconventional workflow to make this process work. It’s not as simple as opening a standard CAD program and getting started; there are multiple steps and specialized tools involved, which can be a barrier for many people.