Large-scale rapid-prototyping with zometool

Abstract

In recent years, personalized fabrication has attracted much attention due to the greatly improved accessibility of consumer-level 3D printers. However, 3D printers still suffer from the relatively long production time and limited output size, which are undesirable for large-scale rapid-prototyping. Zometool, which is a popular building block system widely used for education and entertainment, is potentially suitable for providing an alternative solution to the aforementioned scenarios. However, even for 3D models of moderate complexity, novice users may still have difficulty in building visually plausible results by themselves. Therefore, the goal of this work is to develop an automatic system to assist users to realize Zometool rapid prototyping with a specified 3D shape. Compared with the previous work [Zimmer and Kobbelt 2014], our method may achieve the ease of assembly and economic usage of building units since we focus on generating the Zometool structures through a higher level of shape abstraction.