WildFab: Multi-Axis 3D Printing from Models in the Wild
Multi-axis 3D printing enables support-free fabrication and improved part quality, but robustly processing real-world geometries remains challenging. Models from design workflows or direct data acquisition often contain solid-shell combinations and non-manifold structures. Handling such models in the wild typically requires time-consuming geometry repair, which may alter the intended geometry. In this work, we present WildFab, a computational framework for multi-axis 3D printing that directly computes spatial tool-paths and globally collision-free motions from input models. Our pipeline builds on a hybrid query representation that combines a neural unsigned distance field (UDF) with a regularized generalized winding number field (reg-GWN). The UDF supplies differentiable surface-distance and direction queries, while the reg-GWN resolves near-surface ambiguity in the fitted UDF by providing reliable surface localization and a solid-void indicator. Based on this representation, we introduce a high-precision spatial toolpath computation algorithm that iteratively projects points between optimized guidance-field level sets and reg-GWN gradient-magnitude ridges. Subsequently, we develop an efficient and robust coarse-to-fine collision checking scheme for motion planning: UDF-based rejection first identifies potential collisions, while time-varying reg-GWN verification accurately resolves collision pairs for both solid and shell components. We validate WildFab on diverse inputs, demonstrating successful computation from non-manifold parametric surfaces, voxelized topology-optimization results, implicit models, raw scanned point clouds, and non-watertight meshes. The fabrication results highlight our method's ability to advance end-to-end design-to-3DP workflows.
Authors
- Guoxin Fang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8741-3227)
- Chengkai Dai (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-5683-5044)
- Yeung Yam
- Jiasheng Qu
- Zhikai Shen
- Hailin Sun
- Junpeng Wang
- Yuhu Guo
- Chenyu Xu
Institutions
- Chinese University of Hong Kong (HK)
- Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence (HK)
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- Technical University of Denmark (DK)
Publication Details
- Journal
- ACM Transactions on Graphics
- Published
- 2026-11-09
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3842574
- Primary Topic
- 3D Shape Modeling and Analysis
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Innovation and Technology Commission
- Chinese University of Hong Kong
- Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering