Part of the trouble with this is that often, design isn't about the 'optimal' in a single degree of freedom but rather a case of balancing a larger number of de

Part of the trouble with this is that often, design isn't about the 'optimal' in a single degree of freedom but rather a case of balancing a larger number of design criteria. Having said that, the technology does hold a lot of promise and I already use very rudimentary similar tech (eg: iterative FEA to converge on minimal plate thicknesses for a structure under given static load cases). I agree that 3d printing will help liberate designs from some of the constraints (namely, some of the fabrication constraints - they're some of the most difficult to incorporate in to an 'optimal' design) but I still think there will remain a number of considerations that design engineers must make that will involve sacrificing ideal structure for other advantages: - Interfaces with other equipment / interoperability in a system: curved surfaces aren't too good at being bolted together. A spider-web mesh of structure forming a super-rigid but super-light chassis doesn't lend itself to fitting an engine inside. A design might need 30 years' service out of one part but maybe another part (eg: a hopper for corrosive mineral concentrate) only wants to withstand 3-5 years - it'd need to be easily separable from the parent structure so that can happen. - Maintainability: holes in the parts where 3 beams of the truss converge are just asking for moisture ingress leading to corrosion. Some surfaces may not be easily painted because they're tucked away. Some areas need to be accessable to hand-sized objects in order to perform non-destructive testing for internal cracks/defects. - Portability: it's all well and good to have a single, continuous structure until you have to transport it by truck to site hundreds of kilometres away and down a mine shaft to its intended location. A less optimal but heavier design may in fact offer a better whole-of-life cost if it can be fabricated in China and flat-pack shipped to where you need it, reducing the up-front cost compared to a more elegant, more optimised but more expensive to construct design that is then difficult to ship to site. This is a topic that fascinates me. I really look forward to seeing what comes out in the next 10 years. Even in the last 5 years, I've gone from solving a 60000-element finite element model in 15 minutes, to solving an 80000-element model in 30 seconds. This is about the minimum size I need to do basic analysis on a complete structure, eg: a coal wagon. That smaller timeframe makes iteration so much more possible. I'll be able to now perform more than just iterative convergance on plate thicknessses - adapting the geometry of the model and remeshing is now within the realms of possibility. Similarly, pre- and post-processing software is becoming more capable of interpreting results and intelligently adapting the model to suit. My biggest fear of this technology is that, like FEA makes possible already, many Engineers will fall to the trap of 'garbage in, garbage out'. It's very easy to construct a model that looks like it should represent reality and solves mathematically just fine, but doesn't give realistic or meaningful results. This technology looks like it could amplify that problem significantly. Presently, the only way you learn the unwritten rules of computational analysis is through tutorage by more experienced colleagues. A design that's far more complex because of more complex algorithms will be subsequently far more difficult for them to advise and correct on. Sometimes that simplicity of an inelegant and un-complex but well-understood structure is preferable.