FabricFaces: Combining Textiles and 3D Printing for Maker-Friendly Folding-Based Assembly
LBW at ACM CHI '23
by Adrian Wagner, Paul Miles Preuschoff, Philipp Wacker, Simon Voelker, and Jan Borchers
Abstract
We introduce a Personal Fabrication workflow to easily create feature-rich 3D objects with textile-covered surfaces. Our approach unfolds a 3D model into a series of flat frames with connectors, which are then 3D-printed onto a piece of fabric, and folded manually into the shape of the original model. This opens up an accessible way to incorporate established 2D textile workflows, such as embroidery, using color patterns, and combining different fabrics, when creating 3D objects. FabricFaces objects can also be flattened again easily for transport and storage. We provide an open-source plugin for the common 3D tool Blender. It enables a one-click workflow to turn a user-provided model into 3D printer instructions, textile cut patterns, and connector support. Generated frames can be refined quickly and iteratively through previews and extensive options for manual intervention. We present example objects illustrating a variety of use cases.
Video
Source
Links to source code repository pending!
Publications
- Adrian Wagner, Paul Miles Preuschoff, Philipp Wacker, Simon Voelker and Jan Borchers. FabricFaces: Combining Textiles and 3D Printing for Maker-Friendly Folding-Based Assembly. In Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI EA '23, pages 7, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, April 2023.
