Take the wood out.
This is the side of a couch we are making, before anybody drew it. The computer knows where the weight goes and where the feet are. Press the button and it takes away every bit of wood that is not holding something up.
- How long
- About five minutes. The computer does the work; you watch it think.
- You need
- A mouse, or a finger on a screen · Nothing else
- Messy
- No.
The round hole is a stool top and the arch at the bottom is a stool leg: we wanted those pieces, so the computer was told it could not put wood there. Everything here runs in your browser and nothing is sent to us, the same as everything else on these benches.
That is the end of this one
The word for what you just did is topology optimisation.
Topology optimisation is a way of asking a computer where a thing needs to be strong. You tell it where the weight pushes and where the floor pushes back, and how much material you are willing to spend. It starts with a solid block and takes material away from wherever it is doing the least, over and over, until only the parts that carry something are left. The shape it finds looks like a bridge or a bone, because bridges and bones were found the same way.
Where to go now