We present RodSteward, a design-to-assembly system for creating furniture-scale structures composed of 3D-printed joints and precision-cut rods. The RodSteward systems consists of: RSDesigner, a fabrication-aware design interface that visualizes accurate geometries during edits and identifies infeasible designs; physical fabrication of parts automatically generated 3D-printable joint geometries and cutting plans for rods; and RSAssembler, a guided-assembly interface that prompts the user to place parts in order while showing a focus+context visualization of the assembly in progress. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our tools with a number of example constructions of varying complexity, style and parameter choices.
@article{JacobsonRodSteward2019,
title = {RodSteward: A Design-to-Assembly System for Fabrication using 3D-Printed Joints and Precision-Cut Rods},
author = {Alec Jacobson},
year = {2019},
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
}
This research is funded in part by NSERC Discovery (RGPIN2017–05235, RGPAS–2017–507938), New Frontiers of Research Fund (NFRFE–201), the Ontario Early Research Award program, the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Fields Centre for Quantitative Analysis and Modelling and gifts by Adobe Systems, Autodesk and MESH Inc. We are grateful to Tovi Grossman, Fanny Chevalier, Zhicong Lu, Sarah Kushner, Leo Sacht and Eitan Grinspun for feedback on drafts of this paper. We thank David Levin for illuminating discussions and John Hancock for infrastructural support.
Thank you to Rahul Arora for presenting this work at SCF 2019.