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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  1879 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What This Seat Bracket Says About the Future of Automotive Manufacturing

So is generative design using a genetic algorithm to design parts like Rechenberg in the 60s just more convenient to manufacture now, or am I missing something?





kleinbl00  ·  1879 days ago  ·  link  ·  

"just" if you're willing to invoke 3D printing in the manufacturing process somewhere, which as listed above, puts you in a pretty spectacularly weird regime at the moment.

If you look at that second swing arm, it only exists if you can cast it off an algorithm. Yeah you could probably painstakingly shape it by hand but you're not going to because you don't have any good way to verify that you put stuff in the right place and the weight savings are probably not entirely worth bothering with (I mean, a tire is going to weigh more than what you're saving there). However, as soon as your construction method becomes "make it thicker in one direction by fractions of a mm" it starts to make sense.