A new Web-based
interface for design novices allows a wide range of modifications
to a basic design —
such as a toy car or a black-and-white "yin-yang" cup —
that are guaranteed
to be both structurally stable and printable on a 3-D printer.
Courtesy of the
researchers (edited by MIT News)
Design tool lets novices do in minutes what would take
experts in computer-aided design hours.
(September 4, 2015) The
technology behind 3-D printing is growing more and more common, but the ability
to create designs for it is not. Any but the simplest designs require expertise
with computer-aided design (CAD) applications, and even for the experts, the
design process is immensely time consuming.
Researchers at MIT and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya
in Israel aim to change that, with a new system that automatically turns CAD
files into visual models that users can modify in real time, simply by moving
virtual sliders on a Web page. Once the design meets the user’s specifications,
he or she hits the print button to send it to a 3-D printer.
“We envision a world where everything you buy can
potentially be customized, and technologies such as 3-D printing promise that
that might be cost-effective,” says Masha Shugrina, an MIT graduate student in
computer science and engineering and one of the new system’s designers. “So the
question we set out to answer was, ‘How do you actually allow people to modify
digital designs in a way that keeps them functional?’”
A new Web-based
interface for design novices allows a wide range of modifications
to a basic design —
such as a toy car or a black-and-white "yin-yang" cup —
that are guaranteed
to be both structurally stable and printable on a 3-D printer.
Courtesy of the
researchers (edited by MIT News)
For a CAD user, modifying a design means changing numerical
values in input fields and then waiting for as much as a minute while the
program recalculates the geometry of the associated object.
Once the design is finalized, it has to be tested using
simulation software. For designs intended for 3-D printers, compliance with the
printers’ specifications is one such test. But designers typically test their
designs for structural stability and integrity as well. Those tests can take
anywhere from several minutes to several hours, and they need to be rerun every
time the design changes.
Advance work
Shugrina and her collaborators — her thesis advisor,
Wojciech Matusik, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer
science at MIT, and Ariel Shamir of IDC Herzliya — are trying to turn visual
design into something novices can do in real time. They presented their new system,
dubbed “Fab Forms,” at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Siggraph
conference, in August.