Voronization is a tricky process to transform your 3D model into a very complex structure – but now there’s a simple way to do it: The Voronator!
Wait a sec, what’s Voronization? We wrote about it a few years ago, but in a nutshell it’s transforming the skin of a 3D model into a bio-inspired structure of holes and connections, as you can see in the example here.
It’s quite possible to do this transformation manually with free tools (and Zheng3’s wonderful tutorial explains precisely how to do this), but Tobias Reinhart explains:
After doing this voronoization procedure manually too often I created a free online service to tesselate 3D objects (stl, ply, dae, ..) with a voronoi pattern. It works with arbitrary forms.
We can totally sympathize with this viewpoint, as the steps required to do voronization are a bit tedious, particularly when you have to iterate through several stages to derive an optimum geometry.
Now you can do this automatically with The Voronator, a website that simply performs this service automatically for you. You’ll just need to upload a solid 3D model and the service does the rest. Oh, there are a few simple tweaks you can tinker with, but at most you’re going to do only a few iterations before arriving at the perfect result.
Results are delivered in .PLY format, and so they’ll need to be converted to STL before printing can be done. But that’s easily done in any number of tools. We recommend Meshlab for that.
We have only one complaint about this useful service: it does take a few minutes to prepare your voronized result. It says:
Processing, please be patient. This process will take between one and five minutes.
We’re impatient, like everyone else. But just remember: to do this manually would take much longer than waiting the few moments required by The Voronator.
Thanks for the great service, Tobias!
Via The Voronator
