Dual joints for 3D-structures: producing skins for skeletons by exploring duality

Abstract

The increasing popularity of 3D printing is drawing the interest of the research community to the possibilities and challenges of this manufacturing method. Amongst its many uncertainties, we are concerned here with one of its certainties-that reduction of the material required in 3D printing is critical for efficiency and affordability. In this paper, we propose a solution to the computer graphics problem of, given a volume boundary, automatically defining the mesh of a low density internal structure that is 3D-printable. The proposed solution involves two steps. The first step is to define a cell complex partition for the internal space of a volume defined by its boundaries. The second step, is to apply the Skin4Skeleton algorithm, which uses the cell complex dual to produce a 3D-printable cell-complex mesh with a parametrised thickness.