Visually Pleasant Support-free Decomposition In 3D Printing

3D printing has attracted more and more attention these yeaxs,this mainly due to its convenience in personalized manufacturing.It allows users to get objects directly according to the designed geometry models.However,there still have many problems in this kind of additive manufactur:ing,such as long time is consumed because of the meticulous accumulation of material,material is wasted when support structure is needed,the size of model is limited by the volume of printer.We can solve these problems in many ways,and among them,part decomposition is one of the most effective way to remove support structure and enlarge printable objects.But existing methods seldom consider about the seam between two part will influence the visual quality of the final object.We come up with a visual quality preserved support-free decomposition for 3D printing.We can obtain approximate support-free blocks to save material and printing time.Besides,we optimize the cutting plane,set them where abstrac-t less attention and more perceptional acceptable so that the final object will have well visual quality.We first adopt a top-down approach cutting mesh into support-free blocks iteratively.This approach will make sure the assemblability from the blocks to the object.We pick the block with maximum support vol-ume,and separate it using two cutting operation:one is semantic decomposition aiming to get semantic blocks,another is support-free decomposition aiming to get support-free blocks.Semantic decomposition is superior to the other one in order to preserve visual quality.We generate several sample plane under the guidance of saliency and symmetry of model,select the one with the minimal volume of support structure and length of intersected line.During support-free decomposition,we adjust the orientation of the model waiting to be cut heuristi-cally.Finally,we merge the adjacent blocks that have minimum support volume increase until the support volume meet the given threshold.We test many mod-els and show the printing results,different semantic parts are fabricated using different color to obtain colorful results.