In recent years, personalized fabrication has received considerable attention because of the widespread use of consumer‐level three‐dimensional (3D) printers. However, such 3D printers have drawbacks, such as long production time and limited output size, which hinder large‐scale rapid‐prototyping. In this paper, for the time‐ and cost‐effective fabrication of large‐scale objects, we propose a hybrid 3D fabrication method that combines 3D printing and the Zometool construction set, which is a compact, sturdy and reusable structure for infill fabrication. The proposed method significantly reduces fabrication cost and time by printing only thin 3D outer shells. In addition, we design an optimization framework to generate both a Zometool structure and printed surface partitions by optimizing several criteria, including printability, material cost and Zometool structure complexity.

We would like to thank Sheng-Jie Luo, Hsin-I Chen and anonymous reviewers for insightful suggestions and discussions. During this work, I-Chao Shen was supported by the MediaTek Fellowship. This research was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST105-2218-E-002-011) and National Taiwan University.

@inproceedings{shen2020zomefab,
  title={ZomeFab: Cost-Effective Hybrid Fabrication with Zometools},
  author={Shen, I-Chao and Chen, Ming-Shiuan and Huang, Chun-Kai and Chen, Bing-Yu},
  booktitle={Computer Graphics Forum},
  volume={39},
  number={1},
  pages={322--332},
  year={2020},
  organization={Wiley Online Library}
}