Automated reconstruction of smoothly joining 3D printed restorations to fix broken objects

Abstract

In this work, we provide an approach to automatically reconstruct a 3D printed restoration piece for a broken object from 3D scanned meshes of the broken object and an original counterpart. Our approach provides two contributions to reconstruct a restoration with a smooth join to the broken object, necessary for object functionality such as liquid containment, injury prevention, and visual aesthetic. As our first contribution, we leverage the original counterpart mesh to grow an exterior surface for the restoration piece that approaches the broken object within a small tolerance. As our second contribution, we project the exterior surface boundary onto the broken object to create a fracture surface boundary whose vertices satisfy the constraints of proximity, normal alignment, and tangency to vertices on the exterior surface boundary. Our approach prevents artifacts of volumetric Boolean subtraction, such as floating components and thin long slivers at the join, and avoids ruts at the join region introduced by Euclidean distance thresholding. We show 3D printed restoration results for 14 objects and 3D printable results for 8 objects.