Polycube-based Decomposition for Fabrication

Abstract

In recent years, fabrication technologies developed at a very fast pace. However, some limitations on shape and dimension still apply both to additive and subtractive manufacturing, and one way to bypass them could be the subdivision of the object to build. We present here a simple algorithm, based on the polycube representation of the original shape, able to decompose any model into simpler portions that are better fabricable. The shape is first mapped in a polycube and, then, split to take advantage of the simple polycube subdivision, thus having, quite easily, a partition of the model at hand. The main aim of this work is to study and analyse pros and cons of this simple subdivision scheme for fabrication, in view of using both the additive and subtractive pipelines. The proposed subdivision scheme is computationally light and it produces quite good results, especially when it is applied to models that can be easily decomposed in a small collection of cuboids. The obtained subdivisions are suitable for 3D printing.