In 3D printing, it is critical to use as few as possible supporting materials for efficiency and material saving. Multiple model decomposition methods and multi-DOF (degrees of freedom) 3D printers have been developed to address this issue. However, most systems utilize model decomposition and multi-DOF independently. Only a few existing approaches combine the two, i.e. partitioning the models for multi-DOF printing. In this paper, we present a novel model decomposition method for multi-directional 3D printing, allowing consistent printing with the least cost of supporting materials. Our method is based on a global optimization that minimizes the surface area to be supported for a 3D model. The printing sequence is determined inherently by minimizing a single global objective function. Experiments on various complex 3D models using a five-DOF 3D printer have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.

在3D打印中，至关重要的是使用尽可能少的辅助材料以提高效率和节省材料。已经开发出多种模型分解方法和多种DOF（自由度）3D打印机来解决此问题。但是，大多数系统独立地使用模型分解和多自由度。只有很少的现有方法将两者结合起来，即对模型进行分区以进行多自由度打印。在本文中，我们提出了一种用于多方向3D打印的新颖模型分解方法，该方法可以用最少的辅助材料成本进行一致的打印。我们的方法基于全局优化，可将3D模型支持的表面积最小化。通过最小化单个全局目标函数来固有地确定打印顺序。