Printing-on-Fabric Meta-Material for Self-Shaping Architectural Models

We describe a new meta-material for fabricating lightweight architectural models, consisting of a tiled plastic star pattern layered over pre-stretched fabric, and an interactive system for computer-aided design of doubly-curved forms using this meta-material. 3D-printing plastic rods over pre-stretched fabric recently gained popularity as a low-cost fabrication technique for complex free-form shapes that automatically lift in space. Our key insight is to focus on rods arranged into repeating star patterns, with the dimensions (and hence physical properties) of the individual pattern elements varying over space. Our star-based meta-material on the one hand allows effective form-finding due to its low-dimensional design space, while on the other is flexible and powerful enough to express large-scale curvature variations. Users of our system design free-form shapes by adjusting the star pattern; our system then automatically simulates the complex physical coupling between the fabric and stars to translate the design edits into shape variations. We experimentally validate our system and demonstrate strong agreement between the simulated results and the final fabricated prototypes.