{"id":6090,"date":"2015-09-04T06:22:54","date_gmt":"2015-09-04T06:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=6090"},"modified":"2015-09-04T06:22:54","modified_gmt":"2015-09-04T06:22:54","slug":"customizing-3-d-printing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/customizing-3-d-printing\/","title":{"rendered":"Customizing 3-D printing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Design tool lets novices do in minutes what would take experts in computer-aided design hours.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A new Web-based interface for design novices allows a wide range of modifications to a basic design \u2014 such as a toy car or a black-and-white “yin-yang” cup \u2014 that are guaranteed to be both structurally stable and printable on a 3-D printer.
Courtesy of the researchers (edited by MIT News<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.<\/strong> —\u00a0The technology behind 3-D printing is growing more and more common, but the ability to create designs for it is not. Any but the simplest designs require expertise with computer-aided design (CAD) applications, and even for the experts, the design process is immensely time consuming.<\/span><\/p>\n

Researchers at MIT and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel aim to change that, with a new system that automatically turns CAD files into visual models that users can modify in real time, simply by moving virtual sliders on a Web page. Once the design meets the user\u2019s specifications, he or she hits the print button to send it to a 3-D printer.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe envision a world where everything you buy can potentially be customized, and technologies such as 3-D printing promise that that might be cost-effective,\u201d says Masha Shugrina, an MIT graduate student in computer science and engineering and one of the new system\u2019s designers. \u201cSo the question we set out to answer was, \u2018How do you actually allow people to modify digital designs in a way that keeps them functional?\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

[pullquote]Researchers at MIT and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel aim to change that, with a new system that automatically turns CAD files into visual models that users can modify in real time, simply by moving virtual sliders on a Web page.[\/pullquote]<\/p>\n

For a CAD user, modifying a design means changing numerical values in input fields and then waiting for as much as a minute while the program recalculates the geometry of the associated object.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once the design is finalized, it has to be tested using simulation software. For designs intended for 3-D printers, compliance with the printers\u2019 specifications is one such test. But designers typically test their designs for structural stability and integrity as well. Those tests can take anywhere from several minutes to several hours, and they need to be rerun every time the design changes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Advance work<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Shugrina and her collaborators \u2014 her thesis advisor, Wojciech Matusik, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and Ariel Shamir of IDC Herzliya \u2014 are trying to turn visual design into something novices can do in real time. They presented their new system, dubbed \u201cFab Forms,\u201d at the Association for Computing Machinery\u2019s Siggraph conference, in August.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fab Forms begins with a design created by a seasoned CAD user. It then sweeps through a wide range of values for the design\u2019s parameters \u2014 the numbers that a CAD user would typically change by hand \u2014 calculating the resulting geometries and storing them in a database.<\/span><\/p>\n

For each of those geometries, the system also runs a battery of tests, specified by the designer, and it again stores the results. The whole process would take hundreds of hours on a single computer, but in their experiments, the researchers distributed the tasks among servers in the cloud.<\/span><\/p>\n

In their experiments, the researchers used eight designs, including a high-heeled shoe, a chess set, a toy car, and a coffee mug. The system samples enough values of the design parameters to offer a good approximation of all the available options, but that number varies from design to design. In some cases, it was only a few thousand samples, but in others it was hundreds of thousands. The researchers also developed some clever techniques to exploit similarities in design variations to compress the data, but the largest data set still took up 17 gigabytes of memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Intuitive interface<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, the system generates a user interface, a Web page that can be opened in an ordinary browser. The interface consists of a central window, which displays a 3-D model of an object, and a group of sliders, which vary the parameters of the object\u2019s design. The system automatically weeds out all the parameter values that lead to unprintable or unstable designs, so the sliders are restricted to valid designs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moving one of the sliders \u2014 changing the height of the shoe\u2019s heel, say, or the width of the mug\u2019s base \u2014 sweeps through visual depictions of the associated geometries, presenting in real time what would take hours to calculate with a CAD program. \u201cThe sample density is high enough that it looks continuous to the user,\u201d Matusik says.<\/span><\/p>\n

If, however, a particularly sharp-eyed user wanted a value for a parameter that fell between two of the samples stored in the database, the system can call up the CAD program, calculate the associated geometry, and then run tests on it. That might take several minutes, but at that point, the user will have a good idea of what the final design should look like.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The technology behind 3-D printing is growing more and more common, but the ability to create designs for it is not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6091,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research","category-techbiz"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",639,426,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",639,426,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",639,426,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",639,426,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",639,426,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",600,400,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",600,400,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",639,426,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",540,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",95,63,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",639,426,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",96,64,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/MIT-3D-Printing-Inter-1.jpg",150,100,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Research<\/a> Tech<\/a>","tag_info":"Tech","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}