Reforming Shapes for Material-aware Fabrication

Abstract

As humans, we regularly associate shape of an object with its built material. In the context of geometric modeling, however, this inter-relation between form and material is rarely explored. In this work, we propose a novel data-driven reforming (i.e.; reshaping) algorithm that adapts an input multi-component model for a target fabrication material. The algorithm adapts both the part geometry and the inter-part topology of the input shape to better align with material-aware fabrication requirements. As output, we produce the reshaped model along with respective part dimensions and inter-part junction specifications. We evaluate our algorithm on a range of man-made models and demonstrate a variety of model reshaping examples focusing only on metal and wooden materials.