A Digital Fabrication Assistant for 3D Arts and Crafts

Rapid progress of 3D depth sensing and printing technologies makes digital fabrication an affordable technology for general public. Inexperienced users can readily acquire 3D object data by capturing their surrounding environments with consumer depth sensors and produce physical prototypes by using desktop 3D printers. Although 3D modeling is a key technology to bridge a gap between the 3D acquisition and the 3D printing, it is a deep valley preventing the users from really practicing the digital fabrication. We designed and developed a system enabling even novice users to edit the acquired 3D models with a set of simple operations for producing original models. The system supports all phases, the acquisition, modeling, and printing, through an integrated GUI. We describe the basic concept and implementation method of the system and some preliminary experiments conducted for verifying the effectiveness of the system.