Large-scale fabrication with interior zometool structure

Abstract

In recent years, personalized fabrication has attracted many attentions due to the widespread of consumer-level 3D printers. However, consumer 3D printers still suffer from shortcomings such as long production time and limited output size, which are undesirable factors to large-scale rapid-prototyping. We propose a hybrid 3D fabrication method that combines 3D printing and Zometool structure for both time/cost-effective fabrication of large objects. The key of our approach is to utilize compact, sturdy and re-usable internal structure (Zometool) to infill fabrications and replace both time and material-consuming 3D-printed materials. Unlike the laser-cutted shape used in [Song et al. 2016], we are able to reuse the inner structure. As a result, we can significantly reduce the cost and time by printing thin 3D external shells only.