I am an architecture student at the University Kent and used form lab to generate the supports to print this pipe work I designed. I then decided to keep the supports as part of the design however, tediously had to draw them up into SketchUp. The tutor now wishes for me to explore the algorithm of the supports as he wants me to link the 3D printed supports to a real life situation where the supports become structure to a building.
Does anyone know of anything to do with why the supports are placed where they are.
Formlabs has to protect their IP so you’re unlikely to hear anything from them. However there are open source projects which you could look at, one of them being Ember from Autodesk. They have since dropped the proejcts but there’s a number of conferences available on youtube as well as quite a bit of documentation , some of which I’m sure relate to support generation.
Also look up :
Lattices generation
Infill algorithms for FDM printers
Another interesting solution, albeit also proprietary, is the work of nTopology https://ntopology.com/