7 Conclusion
The main advantages of our approach stem from the implicit
formulation of stochastic microstructures. This has signifi-
cant computational advantages by allowing for evaluation at
slicing time and by avoiding to resort on global optimizations
for each new object. The aperiodic and stochastic nature of
the foams provide a simple and efficient way to grade the
structures and to conform to target elasticity fields in space,
without introducing artificial boundaries.
While we took a strict interpretation on the procedural nature
of our structure generation, it is clear that other computational
schemes could be envisioned. The important
fundamental properties are 1) that the evaluation of the
structure remains local and independent from the overall
size of the domain and 2) that the elastic properties relate
to the structure parameters through a simple relationship
avoiding complex parameter fitting during evaluation.
Our approach deviates significantly from both the periodic
tiling of microstructures and the optimization of macrostructures,
by making a link between microstructures and procedural
solid textures with controlled statistics in computer
graphics. We believe there are many other such structures to
be discovered, and hope our work will spark further interest
in procedurally generated, stochastic microstructures.