Make it Stand is designed to let your 3D prints stand

Posted By Arthur Cassaignau on Aug 12, 2013 | 0 comments

If you’re familiar with 3D printing, you have probably already met this issue. You draw a model, you empty it to use less material printing it and when the job is done, you’re left with a model that won’t stand up.

To solve this issue, 3D prints are often placed on a heavy flat stand to be sure that they stand without any problem. However researchers from INRIA Nancy and the Interactive Geometry Lab, of the scientific and technical university ETF Zurich, came up with a digital solution. They’ve developed an intelligent application to help designers work around gravitational issues.

Make it Stand is a program that allows users to modify the centre of mass so that the model does not tip. The application creates holes inside the model to distributes weight according to the points of balance chosen by the user. The program has been developed to minimize changes on the exteriors of an object, but sometimes it can’t do otherwise. In this case, Make it Stand will work to adjust the weight in the inside and allow minimum changes on the outside. This is the statement made by the developers in their official publication:

Our approach combines stability objectives with shape preservation measures in order to respect the user’s original design, whilst making it feasible without the need for aids such as an oversized base or the addition of stilts. We introduced a novel algorithm that leverages the use of interior voids to manipulate mass distribution without affecting the exterior appearance of the model. We alternate between interior carving and shape deformation to arrive at a final stable result. We have demonstrated effectiveness with numerous results including character models and everyday objects, many requiring particularly delicate balance conditions to stand in equilibrium. Further, we extended our technique to objects that stand on multiple bases.

If you want to learn more about it, you can watch the video below: