General:

The course focuses on the computational aspects of fabrication-aware design, and discusses the forefront of this young research field named "Fabrication-aware Design". This and advanced course, offered to graduate and finishing undergraduate students. The course requires a thorough understanding of general applicative computer-science subjects. A recommended prerequisite is  "Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, Vision and Image Processing", which will definitely prove advantageous to those who have taken it. For those who have not, it is strongly recommended to have some other form of programming experience, such as the course "data structures", or similar counterparts. The course includes a lecture part (of a bit more than half the time), and paper presentations, performed by students.

Agenda:

The course touches the topics required for developing algorithms which ease the process of modeling (or designing) 3D objects that are to be fabricated (via 3D printing in most cases), focusing mostly on geometric optimization. The goal of this course is to introduce the field, and its many sub-areas, to the students.

The course starts with a general introduction to printing technologies, physically-based simulation methods and geometric representation and optimization tools. Afterwards, through discussing recent papers, we demonstrate how these techniques can be leveraged to lighten the load of the aforementioned processes, automize them, or enable object properties which were not possible before.

These examples will been seen for object motion and deformation control, strength control and improvement, and design for appearance. Additionally, some of the examples will demonstrate how these methods can be employed to improve even the time and quality of the printing process itself.

The learned subjects can and will be adjusted according to student interest, as expressed during the semester, but will more or less follow the topics discussed in "Design, Representations, and Processing for Additive Manufacturing"

Grading:

The course imposes no homework, or mandatory attendence. Along with the aforementioned paper presentation requirement, the course has a final project. This project is programmatically heavy, in which the students are asked to implement a published paper (or a part of it), improve the state-of-the-art, or perform some non-trivial part design for fabrication, as chosen by the various groups (of pairs).