Overview

• Developed in CU Boulder's Matter Assembly Computation Lab, OpenVCAD was led by PhD student Charles Wade under assistant professor Robert MacCurdy.
• The methods and demonstrations are detailed in a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Additive Manufacturing.
• The team validated the approach on multiple printers, including a system capable of depositing up to five materials at once.
• OpenVCAD is fully open-source with a Python implementation that users can import to begin designing with a single line of code.
• Wade describes the tool as the first widely available code-based system for multi-material design, with reported early adoption for surgical models, soft robotics, and lattice structures.