Voxel-Based Assessment of Printability of 3D Shapes

Printability, the capability of a 3D printer to closely reproduce a 3D model, is a complex decision involving several geometrical attributes like local thickness, shape of the thin regions and their surroundings, and topology with respect to thin regions. We present a method for assessment of 3D shape printability which efficiently and effectively computes such attributes. Our method uses a simple and efficient voxel-based representation and associated computations. Using tools from multi-scale morphology and geodesic analysis, we propose several new metrics for various printability problems. We illustrate our method with results taken from a real-life application.