Non-Planar 3D Printing

Following the digital process of dipping a geometrical shape into a noise soup and thereby transforming it, as a last step, before the production of a physical brick can begin, the G-code (a kind of instruction for the 3D printer) must be generated for each brick. Since the bricks that make an arch are all angled differently, we had to adopt non-planar printing techniques in the generation of the G-code for each brick of the arch. Using several, increasingly angled planes with different distances between them depending on the size of the nozzle, and intersecting them with each brick, we generated the tool-path for the 3D printer. Since the angle of the bricks cause the distance in height between each lap to be higher in one area, the flow value had to change during the 3D printing process. The solution to this was to diminish and increase the flow value depending on where the extrusion was occurring in relation to one of the axes. A lower position in the x-direction (for example) corresponded to more distance between the laps and thus there should be more clay being extruded in those areas.