Octree reinforced thin-shell rapid prototyping

Rapid prototyping has been accepted widely as an essential element in speeding up industrial practice. By using rapid prototyping methods, prototypes can be completed rapidly in comparison with the use of conventional methods. This paper investigates a 'sub-boundary' octree approach to produce a thin-shell-based rapid prototyping model. A 'sub-boundary' octree means an octree that is wholly in the interior of the original solid. The operation to differenciate the evaluated octree from the solid is studied, the operation being valid for solids that are represented by constructive solid geometry or boundary representation. This is achieved by unioning the octree solid with the reduced volume solid from a negative offset. The proposed method can speed up the rapid prototyping process by enabling the employment of solids of reduced volume with reinforced interior structuring. Possible future work is also discussed, The areas including the development of a sufficient and efficient data structure for the storing and editing of the 'sub-boundary' octree skeleton, the implementation of efficient algorithms to derive the 'sub-boundary' octree approximations from solids, and the verification of the constructability of the theoretical results.