Bone growth modeling for structural optimization?

Hey all, I was wondering if anybody could point me in the right direction for modeling bone cell growth in hopes of 3D printing a single solid that is structurally viable, i.e. stress lines receiving more material to accommodate loads. This sort of application can be seen in SoftKill’s 3D-printed house proposal

I would assume it would involve some combination of Kangaroo, Rabbit, and Weaverbird. Does anyone have any resources for modeling this sort of growth? Thanks.

Welcome @bobobbityboo,

Here’s a video from a few years ago, where Gilles Rétsin - one of the AADRL students who did the Protohouse project - explains rather superficially, how they approached the design.
Structurally speaking, it’s a “purely” tension-based strategy with agents/particles for additive manufacturing (vs. compression-based 3D-printing). They wrote their “own piece of software” that deals with topological optimisation, which for me - since it’s a AADRL/Robert Stuart Smith project - reeks of Processing, nothing less and nothing more.

I don’t really believe that the shape is totally emergent, meaning that it was created entirely from scratch by the particle system. In my opinion, they input some kind of simple base mesh that was then evaluated and optimised by the agents.

I’d rather say that you should look into topological optimisation (i.e. Millipede, Ameba, TOPOS, etc.) and particle systems (i.e. Anemone + Boids Library, Quelea, Kangaroo, etc.).
Although, to be totally honest, you’d probably be better off scripting the whole thing (i.e. Python, C#, VB) yourself. These are pretty complex topics that you can only truly manipulate, if you understand how they work!

(Between us, you can do topological optimisation in the free version of Fusion 360.) :wink: