The method of fabricating objects via silicone molding has a long tradition. Until now, however, creating molds for casting complex objects required a lot of experience and involved manual work, which made the process expensive and slow. Researchers from the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione (ISTI-CNR) and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) have now developed a tool that not only automatically finds the best way of designing the molds, but also delivers templates for so-called “metamolds”: Rigid, 3-D-printed molds used to fabricate the optimized silicone molds. Their method, which can lower the cost of this fabricating technique, is presented at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference.