FlexMolds: Automatic Design of Flexible Shells for Molding

Malomo L., Pietroni N., Bickel B., Cignoni P.

0806 Information Systems  Casting  Digital fabrication  005 Computer programming  knowledge & systems  Software Engineering  programs & data  Shape modeling  0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing  Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design  Modeling  000 Computer science 

We present FlexMolds, a novel computational approach to automatically design flexible, reusable molds that, once 3D printed, allow us to physically fabricate, by means of liquid casting, multiple copies of complex shapes with rich surface details and complex topology. The approach to design such flexible molds is based on a greedy bottom-up search of possible cuts over an object, evaluating for each possible cut the feasibility of the resulting mold. We use a dynamic simulation approach to evaluate candidate molds, providing a heuristic to generate forces that are able to open, detach, and remove a complex mold from the object it surrounds. We have tested the approach with a number of objects with nontrivial shapes and topologies.

Source: ACM transactions on graphics 35 (2016). doi:10.1145/2980179.2982397

Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery,, New York, N.Y. , Stati Uniti d'America

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