Paraflow: A Computational Design Tool for Support-free Multimaterial 3D Printing

While 3D printing affords designers unprecedented geometric complexity, currently it requires cumbersome support structures that are not user-friendly in many ways: materially wasteful, human labor-intensive, time-consuming to remove, damaging to surface finish, and often unreliable in ensuring printability at all. We describe our novel 3D printing method, Injection 3D printing, which, as an add-on extension to existing resin printers requiring minimal hardware changes, offers an alternative to support structures. Our approach innervates the part with fluidic channels that introduce one, or multiple different, resins into the printer, effectively offsetting forces otherwise necessitating support. To allow any resin 3D printer user to implement multimaterial injection printing on their system, we present Paraflow, a computational inverse design tool that innervates a 3D model to be 3D printed by our approach.