FlexMolds: Automatic Design of Flexible Shells for Molding

摘要

We present FlexMolds, a novel computational approach to automaticallyrndesign flexible, reusable molds that, once 3D printed, allowrnus to physically fabricate, by means of liquid casting, multiplerncopies of complex shapes with rich surface details and complexrntopology. The approach to design such flexible molds is based on arngreedy bottom-up search of possible cuts over an object, evaluatingrnfor each possible cut the feasibility of the resulting mold. We userna dynamic simulation approach to evaluate candidate molds, providingrna heuristic to generate forces that are able to open, detach,rnand remove a complex mold from the object it surrounds. We haverntested the approach with a number of objects with nontrivial shapesrnand topologies.