Foundry tool: Multi-material designing for 3-D printing

While many advances have been made, it still has been difficult for non-programmers to create objects made of many materials (or mixtures of materials) without a more user-friendly interface. But this week, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present "Foundry," a system for custom-designing a variety of 3-D printed objects with multiple materials. "In traditional manufacturing, objects made of different materials are manufactured via separate processes and then assembled with an adhesive or another binding process," says PhD student Kiril Vidim?e, who is first author on the paper. "Even existing multi-material 3-D printers have a similar workflow: parts are designed in traditional CAD [computer-aided-design] systems one at a time and then the print software allows the user to assign a single material to each part." In contrast, Foundry allows users to vary the material properties at a very fine resolution that hasn't been possible before.