The results of a collaborative project between a team of researchers from Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid and Disney Research Zurich have recently been announced . Among the findings is the development of new software that could create curved 3D surfaces much more easily and quickly.
This new software was presented to businesses at the ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 conference in Los Angeles. As demonstrated, it can generate flat, curved structures that are then printed directly onto stretched elastic fabric. When released, the fabric contracts and deforms, unfolding into a complex three-dimensional shape.
Rey Juan Carlos University and Disney Research Zurich jointly present their new software to create curved structures for 3D printing
As mentioned in the press release published by the Rey Juan Carlos University of Madrid itself :
3D printing has dramatically simplified the manufacturing of large numbers of objects, although until now creating smooth curved surfaces still required a costly process, both temporarily and financially.
Using our design tool, creating Kirchhoff-Plateau Surfaces requires only a basic 3D printer, a piece of stretch fabric, and a mere twenty minutes.
During our initial testing we found that it was incredibly difficult to manually design planar structures that would result in desired 3D shapes. To create such surfaces the tool should take into account the underlying physical phenomenon. The creation of software that made the design of Kirchhoff-Plateau Surfaces accessible even to less experienced users.
For that reason, it was not enough to predict the shape in 3D for a given planar structure, but for the tool to automatically adjust the design so that it best approximated a user-specified target figure.