  Modern 3D printing technologies and the upcoming mass-customization paradigm
call for efficient methods to produce and distribute arbitrarily-shaped 3D
objects. This paper introduces an original algorithm to split a 3D model in
parts that can be efficiently packed within a box, with the objective of
reassembling them after delivery. The first step consists in the creation of a
hierarchy of possible parts that can be tightly packed within their minimum
bounding boxes. In a second step, the hierarchy is exploited to extract the
(single) segmentation whose parts can be most tightly packed. The fact that
shape packing is an NP-complete problem justifies the use of heuristics and
approximated solutions whose efficacy and efficiency must be assessed.
Extensive experimentation demonstrates that our algorithm produces satisfactory
results for arbitrarily-shaped objects while being comparable to ad-hoc methods
when specific shapes are considered.
