• object fabrication
• manufacturing
• geometry processing

We propose a technique for the decomposition of 3D shapes into pieces that can be manufactured by commonly available CNC milling machines and assembled by hand.
The main novelty introduced by our technique is that the pieces are structured as height fields. This specific characteristic allows the use of 4 axis milling machines leading to a cheaper, faster and scalable manufacturing process.
The method gets as input a triangular mesh and a very coarse manifold polygonal mesh that constitute a shape abstraction of the input shape. We sample uniformly the interior of each face of the polygonal mesh to construct a distance field.
We designed an interlocking system that allows different pieces to plug each other to form the final shape. This interlocking mechanism is designed to offer a sufficient degree of grip such that the structure remains compact and stable once the pieces has been assembled.
We demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach with some printed examples.