Growing and Evolving 3-D Prints

Design—especially of physical objects—can be understood as creative acts solving practical problems. In this article, we describe a biologically inspired developmental model as the basis of a generative form-finding system. Using local interactions between cells in a 2-D environment, then capturing the state of the system at every time step, complex three-dimensional (3-D) forms can be generated by the system. Unlike previous systems, our method is capable of directly producing 3-D printable objects, eliminating intermediate transformations and manual manipulation often necessary to ensure the 3-D form is printable. We devise fitness measures for optimizing 3-D printability and aesthetic complexity and use a covariance matrix adaptation evolutionary strategies algorithm (CMA-ES) to find 3-D forms that are both aesthetically interesting and physically printable using fused deposition modeling printing techniques. We investigate the system’s capabilities by evolving and 3-D printing objects at different levels of structural consistency, and assess the quality of the fitness measures presented to explore the design space of our generative system. We find that by evolving first for aesthetic complexity, then evolving for structural consistency until the form is “just printable,” gives the best results.