Development of Texture Mapping Approaches for Additively Manufacturable Surfaces

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies have been recognized for their capability to build complex components and hence have offered more freedom to designers for a long time. The ability to directly use a computer-aided design (CAD) model has allowed for fabricating and realizing complicated components, monolithic design, reducing the number of components in an assembly, decreasing time to market, and adding performance or comfort-enhancing functionalities. One of the features that can be introduced for boosting a component functionality using AM is the inclusion of surface texture on a given component. This inclusion is usually a difficult task as creating a CAD model resolving fine details of a given texture is difficult even using commercial software packages. This paper develops a methodology to include texture directly on the CAD model of a target surface using a patch-based sampling texture synthesis algorithm, which can be manufactured using AM. Input for the texture generation algorithm can be either a physical sample or an image with heightmap information. The heightmap information from a physical sample can be obtained by 3D scanning the sample and using the information from the acquired point cloud. After obtaining the required inputs, the patches are sampled for texture generation according to non-parametric estimation of the local conditional Markov random field (MRF) density function, which helps avoid mismatched features across the patch boundaries. While generating the texture, a design constraint to ensure AM producibility is considered, which is essential when manufacturing a component using, e.g., Fused Deposition Melting (FDM) or Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF). The generated texture is then mapped onto the surface using the developed distance and angle preserving mapping algorithms. The implemented algorithms can be used to map the generated texture onto a mathematically defined surface. This paper maps the textures onto flat, curved, and sinusoidal surfaces for illustration. After the texture mapping, a stereolithography (STL) model is generated with the desired texture on the target surface. The generated STL model is printed using FDM technology as a final step.