Fabrication oriented shape decomposition using polycube mapping

Abstract In recent years, fabrication technologies have developed at a breakneck pace. However, some limitations on shape and dimension still apply both to additive and subtractive manufacturing, and one way to bypass them could be the partition of the object to build. We present here a novel algorithm, based on the polycube representation of the original shape, able to decompose any model into smaller parts simpler to fabricate. We first map the shape in a polycube and, then, split it to take advantage of the polycube partitioning. In this way, we obtain quite easily a partition of the model. In this work we also study and analyze pros and cons of this partitioning scheme for fabrication, when using both the additive and subtractive pipelines. Our proposed partitioning scheme is computationally light, and it produces high-grade results, especially when applied to models that we can map onto polycubes with a high compactness value.