We present the first algorithm for designing volumetric Michell Trusses. Our method uses a parametrization-based approach to generate trusses made of structural elements aligned with the primary direction of an object's stress field. Such trusses exhibit high strength-to-weight ratio while also being parametrically editable which can be easily integrated with parametric editing tools such as Autodesk Fusion. We show a number of examples that demonstrate that the output of our algorithm produces truss structures that are aligned with an object's underlying stress tensor field, are structurally sound and that their global parametrization facilitates the creation of unique structures in a number of domains.
@inproceedings{Arora:michell:scf:2019,
author = {Arora, Rahul and Jacobson, Alec and Langlois, Timothy R. and Huang, Yijiang
and Mueller, Caitlin and Matusik, Wojciech and Shamir, Ariel and
Singh, Karan and Levin, David I.W.},
title = {Volumetric Michell Trusses for Parametric Design \& Fabrication},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Symposium on Computation Fabrication},
series = {SCF '19},
year = {2019},
location = {Pittsburgh, PA, USA},
numpages = {13},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA}
}
We thank Lawson Fulton and Sarah Kushner for their immense help with rendering the results, Peter Hamilton for narrating the video, and other members of the DGP lab for helping with the structural tests. This research was funded in part by NSERC Discovery (RGPIN-2017-05524, RGPIN2017–05235, RGPAS–2017–507938), NSERC Accelerator (RGPAS-2017-507909), New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRFE–201), UofT Connaught Fund 03114, Canadian Foundation for Innovations John Evans Leadership Fund, the Ontario Early Research Award program, the Canada Research Chairs program, the Fields Centre for Quantitative Analysis and Modelling, the Adobe Research Fellowship program, and gifts by Adobe Systems, Autodesk and MESH Inc.