Design, Representations, and Processing for Additive Manufacturing (Synthesis Lectures on Visual Computing: Computer Graphics, A)

The wide diffusion of 3D printing technologies continuously calls for effective solutions for designing and fabricating objects of increasing complexity. The so called "computational fabrication" pipeline comprises all the steps necessary to turn a design idea into a physical object, and this book describes the most recent advancements in the two fundamental phases along this pipeline: design and process planning. We examine recent systems in the computer graphics community that allow us to take a design idea from conception to a digital model, and classify algorithms that are necessary to turn such a digital model into an appropriate sequence of machining instructions.