Keenan Crane - Variational Surface Cutting (original) (raw)

A variational formulation of cutting makes it easy to explore low-distortion design alternatives. Top: By adjusting parameters in our flow, we obtain designs that look like either classic panelizations for furniture (top left) or designs more reminiscent of race car seats (top right). Alternatively, we can explore how the changing geometry of a surface affects the cuts needed to easily upholster it (bottom).

Without penalizing length, a cut that seeks to minimize distortion will evolve into a curve reminiscent of space filling curves. Surface coloring indicates area distortion (here we explicitly enforce icosahedral symmetry).

Adding a penalty in visible regions causes the flow to automatically hide the cut as much as possible, while avoiding excessive distortion. Left: no penalty. Right: with penalty.

Our flow can be used in conjunction with other design tools, or to optimize existing designs. Here we use a classic volleyball pattern (left) to define our initial cut, and flow to a new design (right) that has both smaller scale distortion (hence more uniform material stress) \emph{and} smaller cut length.

To design a small patch on the surface, we can simply penalize distortion on only one side of the cut. Here for instance, we design bandages adapted to a particular patient or wound (bottom), mimicking real medical dressings adapted to particular body parts (top, courtesy of ~\cite{fletcher2005dressings}).

To verify that we obtain near-isometric flattenings, we reconstruct a surface using the edge lengths from the 2D domain. Wrinkling and crumpling indicate excessive scale distortion (left); similar behavior will occur if such a piece is fabricated from developable material. Even a moderate reduction in distortion can significantly improve manufacturability (right).

Though not the primary focus of this work, our flow yields a low-distortion texture atlas when strong length regularization is used. Top: uniform checkerboards indicate near-isometric flattening. Bottom: flattened patches. All three examples used identical parameters; feature alignment emerges naturally, even without an explicit alignment term. (Orange indicates cuts added as a post-process, in order to obtain disk topology.)

Left: under a conformal cut flow, curves develop more oscillations in regions of high curvature, where the surface is hard to flatten. Right: since long cuts almost completely eliminate area distortion, the surface can be well-approximated by cutting the flattened shape from a sheet of inextensible material. To get a sense of approximation error, we here compute a 3D embedding with edge lengths that closely match the flattened mesh.

We can also find space-filling curves of variable density. Here we adapt our flow to design a cooling element on the hood of a car, where an engine block generates 10x more heat than the rest of the hood. Colors indicate steady-state temperature.