OpenFab

Abstract

Figure 1: Three rhinos, defined and printed using OpenFab. For each print, the same geometry was paired with a different fablet-a shaderlike program which procedurally defines surface detail and material composition throughout the object volume. This produces three unique prints by using displacements, texture mapping, and continuous volumetric material variation as a function of distance from the surface. Abstract3D printing hardware is rapidly scaling up to output continuous mixtures of multiple materials at increasing resolution over ever larger print volumes. This poses an enormous computational challenge: large high-resolution prints comprise trillions of voxels and petabytes of data and simply modeling and describing the input with spatially varying material mixtures at this scale is challenging. Existing 3D printing software is insufficient; in particular, most software is designed to support only a few million primitives, with discrete material choices per object. We present OpenFab, a programmable pipeline for synthesis of multi-material 3D printed objects that is inspired by RenderMan and modern GPU pipelines. The pipeline supports procedural evaluation of geometric detail and material composition, using shader-like fablets, allowing models to be specified easily and efficiently. We describe a streaming architecture for OpenFab; only a small fraction of the final volume is stored in memory and output is fed to the printer with little startup delay. We demonstrate it on a variety of multi-material objects.

Scattering-aware texture reproduction for 3D printing

“…The OpenFab [Vidimče et al 2013] and Spec2Fab [Chen et al 2013] systems are good respective examples of these two types of approaches. Both OpenFab and Spec2Fab can be seen as general frameworks which can accommodate various methods of specifying and/or optimizing for desired material properties, both visual and mechanical.…”

Impact of DIY Home Manufacturing with 3D Printing on the Toy and Game Market

“…In addition, even the humble toys here can have added value in the context of medicine when used as therapeutic aides (e.g., magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) visual demonstration tool [71]). Future open-source toy designs can also begin to take advantage of printing [72] or home milling electronic components [73], multimaterials [73,74] and 4D printing smart materials [75] to increase the toy complexity and playability. As the complexity increases, methods will be needed to ensure that such home manufactured toys meet known standards.…”

Error diffusion on meshes

“…Another application is, of course, in computing the quantities needed for physical output of shapes, e.g., providing an optimized implementation of the dithering stage of the OpenFab pipeline [36]. With the recent advance in mass market 3D printing, the importance of this area will be hard to overestimate.…”