Continuous optimization of interior carving in 3D fabrication

摘要

In this paper we propose an optimization framework for interior carving of 3D fabricated shapes. Interior carving is an important technique widely used in industrial and artistic designs to achieve functional purposes by hollowing interior shapes in objects. We formulate such functional purpose as the objective function of an optimization problem whose solution indicates the optimal interior shape. In contrast to previous volumetric methods, we directly represent the boundary of the interior shape as a triangular mesh. We use Eulerian semiderivative to relate the time derivative of the object function to a virtual velocity field and iteratively evolve the interior shape guided by the velocity field with surface tracking. In each iteration, we compute the velocity field guaranteeing the decrease of objective function by solving a linear programming problem. We demonstrate this general framework in a novel application of designing objects floating in fluid and two previously investigated applications, and print various optimized objects to verify its effectiveness.