Handling heterogeneous structures and materials using blending schemes in V-reps

Abstract

Additive manufacturing has recently enabled the creation of heterogeneous objects in which different materials can be specified at different locations. This creates new exciting perspectives in additive crafting but also presents several challenges, including the problem of specifying rules for varying materials at particular locations as well as encoding user specified properties (such as stress tensors) inside a volumetric model. The aim of this work is to provide an answer to these problems, with the definition of local feature preserving blending schemes that allow both the encodement and the blend of property fields over volumetric representation (V-reps) models, while preserving the original values of such properties where possible. A distance-based blending scheme satisfying this characteristic is described both theoretically and practically, with examples of both homogeneous and heterogeneous primitives in V-rep models.