Field-aligned mesh joinery

We have proposed a novel method for the automatic fabrication of an illustrative representation of a given geometry made up of interlocked planar slices. We have shown the effectiveness of our method both in terms of illustrative quality and physical stability. To the best of our knowledge, no existing fabrication paradigms are able to represent such complex objects. Our method is particularly efficient in terms of production costs. In fact, the production costs scalewith the surface of the object since slices are sampled almost uniformly over the surface. In addition, due to the slice decomposition, mesh joinery is also suitable for the production of medium-scale objects. A useful extension of our framework would be to automatically generate effective instructions to simplify the manual assembly procedure, for example, a packing strategy that could preserve the partial ordering of the model to facilitate the search for the next piece. © 2014 ACM 0730-0301/2014/01-ART3 15.00.