Generating hybrid interior structure for 3D printing

Generating an interior support structure is a key issue in 3D model geometric optimization for 3D printing. Most existing interior support structures have been designed by simulating lightweight structures naturally exist. One limitation of the existing method is that only one single structure is used for the model. However, different parts of a 3D model have different shapes and mechanical properties and different structures demonstrate distinctive advantages for supporting the model. Based on such observation, we propose to use hybrid structures for designing an optimal support structure. In this paper, we present a novel scheme of generating hybrid interior support structures for 3D printing. The proposed approach first partitions an input model into parts with different physical behaviors. Different interior structures are generated for each part, and the interior structures are finally joined together. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid structure obtains higher strength-to-weight ratio than recent competing approaches that use single types of interior structures.