Thin Implicit Utah Teapot: Design for Additive Manufacturing

Converting a surface-based geometric object into a thin solid is an essential requirement for additive manufacturing. Although offset surface and thickening techniques have been widely used for this task, it is in general difficult to model the material structures with these techniques. Taking Utah teapot for example, this paper presents a surface-to-thin solid conversion method using implicit modelling technique. With the proposed technique, any explicitly represented surface object can be directly converted into a solid represented as a collection of implicit thin patches. Due to the easy-blending nature of implicit models, any required complex material structures can be easily integrated into a converted thin-solid model. Experimental results show that the proposed method is an effective solid modelling technique for 3D printing and additive manufacturing of surface-based geometries.