Style2Fab

AI-driven tool makes it easy to personalize 3D-printable models With Style2Fab, makers can rapidly customize models of 3D-printable objects, such as assistive devices, without hampering their functionality.

As 3D printers have become cheaper and more widely accessible, a rapidly growing community of novice makers are fabricating their own objects. To do this, many of these amateur artisans access free, open-source repositories of user-generated 3D models that they download and fabricate on their 3D printer. But adding custom design elements to these models poses a steep challenge for many makers, since it requires the use of complex and expensive computer-aided design (CAD) software, and is especially difficult if the original representation of the model is not available online. Plus, even if a user is able to add personalized elements to an object, ensuring those customizations don’t hurt the object’s functionality requires an additional level of domain expertise that many novice makers lack.

To help makers overcome these challenges, MIT researchers developed a generative-AI-driven tool that enables the user to add custom design elements to 3D models without compromising the functionality of the fabricated objects. A designer could utilize this tool, called Style2Fab, to personalize 3D models of objects using only natural language prompts to describe their desired design. The user could then fabricate the objects with a 3D printer.

Publication: Faraz Faruqi, Ahmed Katary, Tarik Hasic, Amira Abdel-Rahman, Nayeemur Rahman, Leandra Tejedor, Mackenzie Leake, Megan Hofmann, Stefanie Mueller Style2Fab: Functionality-Aware Segmentation for Fabricating Personalized 3D Models with Generative AI.

Style2Fab User Interface and Workflow Style2Fab is a plugin for the open-source 3D design software tool Blender.

To stylize a model with Style2Fab, the user must:

1. Pre- process their model for segmentation and stylization
2. Segment and classify the functionality of each segment
3. Selectively apply a style to segments based on functionality
4. Review their stylized model