skip to main content
research-article

Metamolds: computational design of silicone molds

Published: 30 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We propose a new method for fabricating digital objects through reusable silicone molds. Molds are generated by casting liquid silicone into custom 3D printed containers called metamolds. Metamolds automatically define the cuts that are needed to extract the cast object from the silicone mold. The shape of metamolds is designed through a novel segmentation technique, which takes into account both geometric and topological constraints involved in the process of mold casting. Our technique is simple, does not require changing the shape or topology of the input objects, and only requires of-the-shelf materials and technologies. We successfully tested our method on a set of challenging examples with complex shapes and rich geometric detail.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (136-514.mp4)
MP4 File (a136-alderighi.mp4)

References

[1]
Marco Attene. 2015. Shapes In a Box: Disassembling 3D Objects for Efficient Packing and Fabrication. Comput. Graph. Forum 34, 8 (Dec. 2015), 64--76.
[2]
V. Babaei, J. Ramos, Y. Lu, G. Webster, and W. Matusik. 2017. FabSquare: Fabricating Photopolymer Objects by Mold 3D Printing and UV Curing. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 37, 3 (May 2017), 34--42.
[3]
Amit H. Bermano, Thomas Funkhouser, and Szymon Rusinkiewicz. 2017. State of the Art in Methods and Representations for Fabrication-Aware Design. Comput. Graph. Forum 36, 2 (May 2017), 509--535.
[4]
S. Biasotti, D. Giorgi, M. Spagnuolo, and B. Falcidieno. 2008. Reeb Graphs for Shape Analysis and Applications. Theor. Comput. Sci. 392, 1--3 (Feb. 2008), 5--22.
[5]
Yuri Boykov, Olga Veksler, and Ramin Zabih. 2001. Fast Approximate Energy Minimization via Graph Cuts. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 23, 11 (Nov. 2001), 1222--1239.
[6]
Tim Bruckner, Zach Oat, and Ruben Procopio. 2010. Pop sculpture. Watson-Guptill Publications.
[7]
Vicent Caselles, Ron Kimmel, and Guillermo Sapiro. 1997. Geodesic Active Contours. Int. J. Comput. Vision 22, 1 (Feb. 1997), 61--79.
[8]
Pritam Chakraborty and N. Venkata Reddy. 2009. Automatic determination of parting directions, parting lines and surfaces for two-piece permanent molds. Journal of Materials Processing Technology 209, 5 (2009), 2464 -- 2476.
[9]
Xiaobai Chen, Aleksey Golovinskiy, and Thomas Funkhouser. 2009. A Benchmark for 3D Mesh Segmentation. ACM Trans. Graph. 28, 3, Article 73 (July 2009), 12 pages.
[10]
Xuelin Chen, Hao Zhang, Jinjie Lin, Ruizhen Hu, Lin Lu, Qixing Huang, Bedrich Benes, Daniel Cohen-Or, and Baoquan Chen. 2015. Dapper: Decompose-and-pack for 3D Printing. ACM Trans. Graph. 34, 6, Article 213 (Oct. 2015), 12 pages.
[11]
Ernest P De Garmo, J Temple Black, and Ronald A Kohser. 2011. DeGarmo's materials and processes in manufacturing. John Wiley & Sons.
[12]
Andrew Delong, Anton Osokin, Hossam N. Isack, and Yuri Boykov. 2012. Fast Approximate Energy Minimization with Label Costs. Int. J. Comput. Vision 96, 1 (Jan. 2012), 1--27.
[13]
Tamal K. Dey, Fengtao Fan, and Yusu Wang. 2013. An Efficient Computation of Handle and Tunnel Loops via Reeb Graphs. ACM Trans. Graph. 32, 4, Article 32 (July 2013), 10 pages.
[14]
Gurobi Optimization, Inc. 2016. Gurobi Optimizer Reference Manual. (2016). http://www.gurobi.com
[15]
Philipp Herholz, Wojciech Matusik, and Marc Alexa. 2015. Approximating Free-form Geometry with Height Fields for Manufacturing. Comput. Graph. Forum 34, 2 (May 2015), 239--251.
[16]
Ruizhen Hu, Honghua Li, Hao Zhang, and Daniel Cohen-Or. 2014. Approximate Pyramidal Shape Decomposition. ACM Trans. Graph. 33, 6, Article 213 (Nov. 2014), 12 pages.
[17]
Alec Jacobson. 2017. Generalized Matryoshka: Computational Design of Nesting Objects. Comput. Graph. Forum 36, 5 (Aug. 2017), 27--35.
[18]
Evangelos Kalogerakis, Aaron Hertzmann, and Karan Singh. 2010. Learning 3D Mesh Segmentation and Labeling. ACM Trans. Graph. 29, 4, Article 102 (July 2010), 12 pages.
[19]
Michael Kazhdan and Hugues Hoppe. 2013. Screened Poisson Surface Reconstruction. ACM Trans. Graph. 32, 3, Article 29 (July 2013), 13 pages.
[20]
Benjamin Keinert, Matthias Innmann, Michael Sänger, and Marc Stamminger. 2015. Spherical Fibonacci Mapping. ACM Trans. Graph. 34, 6, Article 193 (Oct. 2015), 7 pages.
[21]
Alan C. Lin and Nguyen Huu Quang. 2014. Automatic generation of mold-piece regions and parting curves for complex CAD models in multi-piece mold design. Computer-Aided Design 57 (2014), 15 -- 28.
[22]
O. Litany, E. Rodolà, A. M. Bronstein, M. M. Bronstein, and D. Cremers. 2016. Non-Rigid Puzzles. Comput. Graph. Forum 35, 5 (Aug. 2016), 135--143.
[23]
Ligang Liu, Ariel Shamir, Charlie Wang, and Emily Whitening. 2014. 3D Printing Oriented Design: Geometry and Optimization. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 Courses (SA '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 1.
[24]
Linjie Luo, Ilya Baran, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, and Wojciech Matusik. 2012. Chopper: Partitioning Models into 3D-printable Parts. ACM Trans. Graph. 31, 6, Article 129 (Nov. 2012), 9 pages.
[25]
Luigi Malomo, Nico Pietroni, Bernd Bickel, and Paolo Cignoni. 2016. FlexMolds: Automatic Design of Flexible Shells for Molding. ACM Trans. Graph. 35, 6, Article 223 (Nov. 2016), 12 pages.
[26]
M. Mortara, G. Patanè, M. Spagnuolo, B. Falcidieno, and J. Rossignac. 2004. Plumber: A Method for a Multi-scale Decomposition of 3D Shapes into Tubular Primitives and Bodies. In Proc. of the 9th ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling and Applications (SM '04). Eurographics Association, Aire-la-Ville, Switzerland, Switzerland, 339--344.
[27]
Daniele Panozzo, Enrico Puppo, Marco Tarini, and Olga Sorkine-Hornung. 2014. Frame Fields: Anisotropic and Non-orthogonal Cross Fields. ACM Trans. Graph. 33, 4, Article 134 (July 2014), 11 pages.
[28]
Guodong Rong and Tiow-Seng Tan. 2006. Jump Flooding in GPU with Applications to Voronoi Diagram and Distance Transform. In Proceedings of the 2006 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D '06). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 109--116.
[29]
Ariel Shamir. 2008. A survey on Mesh Segmentation Techniques. Computer Graphics Forum (2008).
[30]
L. Shapira, S. Shalom, A. Shamir, D. Cohen-Or, and H. Zhang. 2010. Contextual Part Analogies in 3D Objects. Int. J. Comput. Vision 89, 2--3 (Sept. 2010), 309--326.
[31]
Oana Sidi, Oliver van Kaick, Yanir Kleiman, Hao Zhang, and Daniel Cohen-Or. 2011. Unsupervised Co-segmentation of a Set of Shapes via Descriptor-space Spectral Clustering. ACM Trans. Graph. 30, 6, Article 126 (Dec. 2011), 10 pages.
[32]
Robert W. Sumner and Jovan Popović. 2004. Deformation Transfer for Triangle Meshes. ACM Trans. Graph. 23, 3 (Aug. 2004), 399--405.
[33]
Nobuyuki Umetani, Bernd Bickel, and Wojciech Matusik. 2015. Computational Tools for 3D Printing. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Courses (SIGGRAPH '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 9.
[34]
J. Vanek, J. A. Garcia Galicia, B. Benes, R. Mźch, N. Carr, O. Stava, and G. S. Miller. 2014. PackMerger: A 3D Print Volume Optimizer. Comput. Graph. Forum 33, 6 (Sept. 2014), 322--332.
[35]
Somlak Wannarumon. 2011. Reviews of Computer-Aided Technologies for Jewelry Design and Casting. Naresuan University Engineering Journal 6, 1 (2011), 45--56.
[36]
Chunjie Zhang, Xionghui Zhou, and Congxin Li. 2010. Feature extraction from freeform molded parts for moldability analysis. The International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology 48, 1 (01 Apr 2010), 273--282.
[37]
Eugene Zhang, Konstantin Mischaikow, and Greg Turk. 2005. Feature-based Surface Parameterization and Texture Mapping. ACM Trans. Graph. 24, 1 (Jan. 2005), 1--27.
[38]
Qingnan Zhou, Eitan Grinspun, Denis Zorin, and Alec Jacobson. 2016. Mesh Arrangements for Solid Geometry. ACM Trans. Graph. 35, 4, Article 39 (July 2016), 15 pages.
[39]
Song Chun Zhu and Alan Yuille. 1996. Region Competition: Unifying Snakes, Region Growing, and Bayes/MDL for Multiband Image Segmentation. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 18, 9 (Sept. 1996), 884--900.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A Study on Improving the Shape Error of the Lower Mold of Free-Form Concrete Panels Using Magnetic ForceBuildings10.3390/buildings1409297914:9(2979)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Repulsive ShellsACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/365817443:4(1-22)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Shape Cast: Automating 3D Design for Plaster Molds in Ceramic Slip CastingExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651020(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Metamolds: computational design of silicone molds

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
    ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 37, Issue 4
    August 2018
    1670 pages
    ISSN:0730-0301
    EISSN:1557-7368
    DOI:10.1145/3197517
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 30 July 2018
    Published in TOG Volume 37, Issue 4

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. casting
    2. fabrication
    3. molding

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Funding Sources

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)62
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)20
    Reflects downloads up to 03 Mar 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)A Study on Improving the Shape Error of the Lower Mold of Free-Form Concrete Panels Using Magnetic ForceBuildings10.3390/buildings1409297914:9(2979)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2024
    • (2024)Repulsive ShellsACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/365817443:4(1-22)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Shape Cast: Automating 3D Design for Plaster Molds in Ceramic Slip CastingExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651020(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)PackMolds: computational design of packaging molds for thermoformingThe Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics10.1007/s00371-024-03462-840:7(4689-4700)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
    • (2023)VASCO: Volume and Surface Co-Decomposition for Hybrid ManufacturingACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/361832442:6(1-17)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2023
    • (2022)Features of modeling a polymer implant for closing a defect after decompressive craniotomyVoprosy neirokhirurgii imeni N.N. Burdenko10.17116/neiro2022860111786:1(17)Online publication date: 2022
    • (2022)Interactive and Robust Mesh BooleansACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/3550454.355546041:6(1-14)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2022
    • (2022)SoRoCAD: A Design Tool for the Building Blocks of Pneumatic Soft RoboticsExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519770(1-7)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
    • (2022)State of the Art in Computational Mould DesignComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1458141:6(435-452)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
    • (2022)Industrial‐scale vacuum casting with silicone molds: A reviewApplied Research10.1002/appl.2021000121:1-2Online publication date: 16-Feb-2022
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    Full Access

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media