Blow-up Print
Rapidly 3D Printing Inflatable Objects in the Compressed State
Video
Introduction
3D printing is becoming a widely used technology not only for prototyping but for industrial fabrication. People have access to several types of 3D printing methods, such as fused deposition modeling (FDM), stereolithography apparatus (SLA), and selective laser sintering (SLS), to build physical objects with diverse material properties through different processes. Despite such options, we generally suffer from longer printing time, support material consumption, and/or storage space as a printed object gets bigger.
We propose Blow-up Print, the method to print a squashed 3D model and restore the original shape by inflation in the real world. Squashing reduces height and volume, leading to a reduction in printing time and support material consumption. Compared to the previous methods, our proposing method is simple yet applicable to more general geometries other than tapered shapes.
Less time
By reducing the height, the number of layers can be reduced and printing time is expected to decrease.
Less support material
In many cases, reducing the height also reduces the volume, thus reducing the amount of support material used to fill the interior of the object during printing.
Less storage space
By storing them in squashed state when not in use, storage space can be saved.
Results
Our goals are to form a shape similar to the input with less time and support material consumption. We examined these with the three inputs shown below. These models are printed at 12 cm in diameter and 1 mm in thickness and are compressed in height by 40%-60% compared to the originals. In all the examples, our method achieved similar shapes in less time and with less support material.
Publication
Mikihito Matsuura, Koya Narumi, Toshiki Aoki, Yuta Noma, Kazutaka Nakashima, Yoshihiro Kawahara, and Takeo Igarashi. 2022. Blow-up Print: Rapidly 3D Printing Inflatable Objects in the Compressed State. In Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Posters (SIGGRAPH ’22 Posters), August 07-11, 2022. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages.