3D Printing Textiles and Slicing Using Grasshopper

Used grasshopper to slice simple geometry and also looked at 3D printing textile using the ideas from Haruki Takahashi and Jeeeun Kim. 2019. 3D Printed Fabric: Techniques for Design and 3D Weaving Programmable Textiles.

Used grasshopper to directly generate GCode of basic structures. Initially made a cube in Rhino and used Slicer Sample provide as part of MAT594X course at UCSB. The Simple Slicer provided first finds the bounding box of the selected geometry, then uses a user defined layer height to slice the selected geometry at different heights. It then creates a column of points along the Z-axis on the boundary of the selected geometry. The number of columns can be modified by the user. The more the number of columns the better resolution the object will have and the longer it will take to print the object. I then created a spiral like structure using the extrude curve functionality and then created the GCode for it. The cube and the spiral GCodes were then directly sent to the printer to print.

This is how they look like after 3D printing them. The slicer is limited enough and cannot have open surfaces. It connects the spiral's start and end points.

Using grasshopper and following the idea of Haruki Takahashi and Jeeeun Kim tried 3D textile. Used the above mentioned parameters create the GCode.

This is how it looks like after 3D printing it. The longer one is quite flexible and could be bent in different shapes. As a happy coincidence the initial spiral that I printed this band like textile could be combined together to form some kind of fashionable band. The band itself is quite smooth.