CHS: Small: An Integrated Editing Environment for 3D Printing

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

3D printing is rapidly becoming accessible and affordable, and may someday support a variety of manufacturing, craft, and creative jobs. However, a number of barriers remain to its more widespread use. One key barrier is the sequential nature of 3D printing workflows, in particular, the gap between modeling of the the shape to be printed and "slicing", developing a plan to create the model on a given 3D printing device. Most 3D printing tools separate these steps, which can cause wasteful printing or fundamental design problems if there is no easy way to render a particular model using a given device's capabilities; these problems are especially vexing for novice makers. This project will develop tools that provide both modeling and slicing capabilities and interfaces that help designers better consider device constraints and choose appropriate devices for their models. The team will leverage existing research on making slicing tools more efficient and ideas from how 2D design programs incorporate printer characteristics to address a number of challenges in integrating modeling and slicing. These include the need to rapidly generate slicing plans for a number of possible 3D printers, present feedback about potential problems that supports designers without overwhelming them, suggest alternative designs that address those problems, and understand how integrating these constraints affects designers' processes and abilities. In the course of the work, the team will produce a comprehensive catalog of 3D printing device characteristics that will support other research and design work in this space, as well as classes that will use the integrated tools to better teach the relationship between design decisions and design outcomes. The team will first classify different fabrication processes, devices, and materials available for 3D printing, then systematically analyze which fabrication parameters are useful to know about during 3D editing. They will both review existing products and manuals as well as interview experienced users about problems with fabrication that most affect their modeling, and develop a library of extensible, human- and machine-readable .xml files that incorporate these most relevant constraints. They will then study effective interaction models for such an integrated 3D editing environment. This includes both (1) how to present information about fabrication constraints, comparing the effectiveness of overlaid or parallel views of the rendered object alongside the 3D model mesh versus textual or audio warnings and (2) ways fabrication constraints might be embedded into how the tools work with users, such as snapping to grids based on the resolution of a selected device. Finally, they will explore how these interactions and tools might support seamless switching between different fabrication devices and plans for multiple-device environments such as makerspaces and fabrication labs. This entails developing semantic but device-independent annotations of a model's functional requirements as well as methods for generating and metrics for comparing a number of fabrication plans in order to suggest effective ones for a particular model. The goal is to leverage locality of design changes to make those methods fast enough to use not just at the end of modeling, but as a model is being constructed, allowing tools to present information about design choices that rule out or favor particular fabrication possibilities and the associated costs in time, materials, and money.