While SLA (stereolithography) 3D printing has achieved significant advancements in the last years, it is still common that one material is used per print job. For the production of next generation materials efforts lead to different solutions that allow printing with multiple materials in one-part through different mechanism: usage of multiple vats, deposition of materials via inkjet or varying the curing parameters (such as wavelength). With our work we show how designing and modelling of parts with multiple materials can work and what benefits the definition of properties at the level of individual voxels (volumetric pixels) have compared to the commonly used boundary representations.

Specifically, we develop a tailored software solution that allows creating of voxel-based models, furthermore we adapt the SLA printing process to handle voxel-based data. Our work includes several algorithms that allow efficient storage and rendering of voxel-based models. Therefore, we contribute in the field of modelling for multi-material printing at the level of individual voxels by demonstrating handling of voxel-based 3D models.

We also validate our approach by implementing two distinct multi-material SLA strategies. With these 3D printing technologies, we are able to print parts that showcase possible applications for 3D printed multi materials parts, including 4D printing and mechanical test specimens with a combination of soft and brittle materials. With different combinations of these materials, we test how the mechanical behavior changes to test if a printed hybrid material can outmatch one of the used materials alone.