Procedural Composite Material - Macro Foam

This is a test of what I call Macro Foam. It uses the capabilities for 3D printing to produce accurate arrangements of multiple materials to create a digital composite, and demonstrates a procedurally generated example. This material was intended to have specifically controllable properties of density and compressibility (once the materials are calibrated through testing). It is made of a solid material, a soft, elastic material, and empty space. The idea (totally untested) is that the material would be low-density and very compressible until the hard parts come in contact with each other, at which point the resistance quickly increases.

The "foam" is generated by a novel combination of classical algorithms. It first places seed points within the volume. These points are randomly distributed here, but could easily vary in density and arrangement based on the results of a simulation, increasing density based on stress, for example. To generate the spheres, each voxel is colored base