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What is Voronoi?
A Voronoi pattern divides a surface into cells: you scatter points on it, and each cell is the area that is closer to its point than to any other point. The borders between the cells form an irregular net that looks natural – you find it on a giraffe's skin, in dragonfly wings, in leaf veins, in dried mud and in soap foam.
The name comes from the Ukrainian mathematician Georgy Voronoy, who described these diagrams in 1908 (Descartes and Dirichlet had used the idea before).
Voronoi and 3D printing
Voronoization turns the surface of a 3D model into such a net: the cells become holes, their borders become the walls of a lattice that keeps the shape of the model. What can you use it for?
- Because it looks good: lamps and lampshades (with great shadows), vases, bowls, jewelry, figurines, phone cases and decorations get an organic, airy look.
- Less material and weight: a lattice needs only a fraction of the material of a closed surface, so it's lighter, cheaper and often faster to print.
- Relatively strong for its weight: the walls form a network of struts that spreads the loads, similar to the inside of bones. A lattice is of course not as strong as a solid part, but much stronger than you'd expect from its weight.
- Air and light: for housings and covers that need ventilation, or to let light through.
Tip: lattices have many overhangs. Resin and SLS printers handle them easily; on filament (FDM) printers choose walls that aren't too thin and use supports if needed.
About this service
Supported formats
Currently supported formats for input are:
| STL | Stereolithography, binary and ASCII |
| PLY | Stanford Polygon Library |
| OBJ | Wavefront Object |
| OFF | Object File Format |
| DAE | Collada |
| 3DS | 3D Studio |
As output format we provide 3MF, PLY and STL (both binary) and OBJ. You can upload models of up to 20 MB.
The result is rubbish!
Yeah, that can happen. Not all models are suitable for our Voronoization process.
Take a look at the following models to get an idea what kind of models will not work.
Models with thin solids or convoluted structures will not work with our Voronoization process.
Credits
Voronoization is done with MeshLab (PyMeshLab), the 3D preview with three.js. The sample images were rendered with POV-Ray. The example model is the Stanford Bunny from the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository.