Elastic Textures for Additive Fabrication

We introduce elastic textures: a set of parametric, tileable, printable, cubic patterns achieving a broad range of elastic material properties: the softest pattern is over a thousand times softer than the stiffest, and the Poisson ratios range from below zero to nearly 0.5. Using a combinatorial search over topologies followed by shape optimization, we explore a wide space of wireframe-like, symmetric 3D patterns to obtain a small family. This pattern family can be printed without internal support structure on a single-material 3D printer and can be used to fabricate objects with prescribed mechanical behavior. The family can be extended easily to create families of anisotropic patterns with target orthotropic properties. We demonstrate that our elastic textures are able to achieve a user-supplied variable distribution of material properties. We also present a material optimization algorithm to choose material prop- erties at each point within an object to best fit a target deformation under a prescribed load. We show that, by fabricating these spatially varying materials with elastic textures, the desired behavior is achieved by the printed object.