We introduce a computational solution for cost-efficient 3D fabrication using universal building blocks. Our key idea is to employ a set of universal blocks, which can be massively prefabricated at a low cost, to quickly assemble and con-stitute a significant internal core of the target object, so that only the residual volume needs to be 3D printed online. We further improve the fab-rication efficiency by decomposing the residual volume into a small numberof printing-friendly pyramidal pieces. Computationally, we face acoupled decomposition problem: decomposing the input object into an internal core and residual, and decomposing the residual, to fulfill a combination of objectives for efficient 3D fabrication. To this end, we formulate an optimization that jointly minimizes the residual volume, the number of pyra-midal residual pieces, and the amount of support waste when printing the residual pieces.To solve the optimization in a tractable manner, we start with a maximal internal core and iteratively refine it with local cuts to minimize the cost function. Moreover, to efficiently explore the large search space, we resort to cost estimates aided by pre-computation and avoid the need to explicitly construct pyramidal decompositions for each solution candidate. Result show that our method can iteratively reduce the estimated printing time and cost, as well as the support waste, and helps to save hours of fabrication time and much material consumption.
