There are wide variety of printing technique for modern 3D printing, and thanks to its vatiery, 3D printing technique has been widely spread and commonly used for many purpose. In this workshop, we focus on powder-type 3D printing. This kind of 3D printing is used not only for hobbies (e.g. printing figures) but also more serious fabrication (e.g. printing functional parts such as gears or cranks). This powder-type 3D printing does not require any additional support structure for successful printing because non-solidified powder material behaves as support structure. This is a very strong advantage compared to typical 3D printing technique such as fused deposition modeling (FDM). However, non-solidified powder enclosed by the solidified shell needs to be removed after printing procedure finishes. Thus, at least one drain hole is required for this powder-type 3D printing. In current practice, such drain holes are manually installed by artists, designers, or 3D printing engineers. This takes much time and manual efforts. Furthermore, drain holes installed manually does not always recover powder material efficiently.
We developed efficient algorithm for estimate drainability, and which allows users to automatically specify the drain hole position. In this workshop, we compare manually specified drain hole position by users and automatically specified drain hole position by our method. In addition to the comparison, we also have discussions with attendee about potential extensions of our methods.