3-D printing has progressed over the last decade to include multi-material fabrication, enabling production of powerful, functional objects. While many advances have been made, it still has been difficult for non-programmers to create objects made of many materials (or mixtures of materials) without a more user-friendly interface.



But this week, a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present “Foundry,” a system for custom-designing a variety of 3-D printed objects with multiple materials.



In traditional manufacturing, objects made of different materials are manufactured via separate processes and then assembled with an adhesive or another binding process. Even existing multi-material 3-D printers have a similar workflow: parts are designed in traditional CAD [computer-aided-design] systems one at a time and then the print software allows the user to assign a single material to each part.



In contrast, Foundry allows users to vary the material properties at a very fine resolution that hasn’t been possible before.



It’s like Photoshop for 3-D materials, allowing you to design objects made of new composite materials that have the optimal mechanical, thermal, and conductive properties that you need for a given task