Rapid jewelry manufacture using spatial subdivision

The paper presents a theory for making rapid prototypes of jewelry from octree subdivision. Traditionally, the input of jewelry for making jewel rapid prototypes is the CAD models' representation. In this paper, a new representation for jewelry is introduced. Aesthetic jewelry is first bounded by a minimum bounding cube. The bounding cube is then subdivided into octrees. The cubes obtained are in three types: cubes fully filled the jewel model; cubes partially filled the jewel model and cubes out of the jewel model. Cubes out of the jewel model; are expelled, while cubes fully filled the jewel model are retained. For cubes partially filled in the jewel model, additional octree subdivision is performed. The number of octree subdivision levels depends upon the end-user requirement. After the octree subdivision process is completed, cubes partially filled the jewel model from different subdivision levels are replaced by boundary voxels. The final voxel model undergoes direct slicing to build the rapid prototype.