3D printing technology is rapidly maturing and becoming ubiquitous. One of the remaining obstacles to wide-scale adoption is that the object to be printed must fit into the working volume of the 3D printer. We propose a framework, called Chopper, to decompose a large 3D object into smaller parts so that each part fits into the printing volume. These parts can then be assembled to form the original object. We formulate a number of desirable criteria for the partition, including assemblability, having few components, unobtrusiveness of the seams, and structural soundness. Chopper optimizes these criteria and generates a partition either automatically or with user guidance. Our prototype outputs the final decomposed parts with customized connectors on the interfaces. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Chopper on a variety of non-trivial real-world objects.

@article{Luo:2012:CPM,
   author = "Linjie Luo and Ilya Baran and Szymon Rusinkiewicz and Wojciech Matusik",
   title = "Chopper: Partitioning Models into {3D}-Printable Parts",
   journal = "ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia)",
   year = "2012",
   month = dec,
   volume = "31",
   number = "6"
}