3D printing of voxel-based structures by direct creation of STL file format

Voxel-based structures are composed of tiny cubic building blocks called voxels. These structures have found widespread applications in volumetric visualization of medical images and computer graphics. In voxel-based structures, connectivity plays a crucial role, influencing almost all properties of the structure. Moreover, connectivity is essential for the manufacturability of voxel-based structures using 3D printing techniques. Due to their inherent complexity, traditional fabrication methods are not suitable for constructing these structures. In this research, two-dimensional images are used to create a voxel-based three-dimensional structure, and considering that a real physical object must be a connected region, an efficient algorithm for identifying connected regions called clusters is presented. For the 3D printing of the object, which will actually be the largest cluster, a file that can be read by the slicer software of the 3D printing machine is needed. The STL file format is the most common format in this domain. Therefore, an algorithm was proposed to directly generate the STL file of the structure, and the STL file was produced. ASCII encoding was employed for file generation. The STL file generated by the algorithm was printed using the fused deposition modeling method.