Abstract | This article presents Cuttlefish, a 3-D printer driver developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD. Cuttlefish maximizes the reproduction quality of shape and appearance in multimaterial 3-D printing systems. It controls various printing systems and material sets, including color, transparent, and flexible materials. The article provides an overview of Cuttlefish’s graphical 3-D printing pipeline and focuses on its unique features: Displaced signed distance fields for robust voxelization of objects not designed for 3-D printing, joint color and translucency reproduction, accurate color and translucency characterization, shape dithering to eliminate quantization-based staircase artifacts, and support for displacement maps and constructive solid geometry operations. The article concludes by showcasing applications of Cuttlefish in printing replacement faces for stop-motion animation, large-scale figurine production, and prosthetic eye printing. |
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