Interactive 3D Modeling and Digital Fabrication using Computation-Friendly Variational Methods
Olga Sorkine-Hornung - ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Session chair: Peter Sloot

Abstract : Digital 3D shapes are ubiquitously used in product design and engineering, architecture, simulator training, medicine and prosthetics, virtual and augmented reality, entertainment and art. With the advancement and democratization of modern fabrication technologies such as 3D printing and personal robotic fabrication, interactive and intuitive tools for geometric modeling and processing gain importance and spread. In this talk, I will discuss the research efforts of my lab in this domain, in particular in light of the growing resolution and proliferation of available geometric and visual data. I will focus on modeling with irregular polygonal meshes, since they are a powerful digital shape representation: such meshes are flexible and can represent virtually any complex shape; they are efficiently rendered by graphics hardware; they are the standard output of 3D acquisition and routinely used as input to simulation software. Yet irregular meshes are difficult to interactively model and edit because they lack a higher-level control mechanism. I will survey a series of research results on surface modeling via mesh deformation and show how high-resolution meshes can be interactively manipulated and animated in a real-time and intuitive manner. I will also discuss how the incorporation of some simple physics laws directly into the interactive modeling framework can be done inexpensively and beneficially for geometric modeling: while not being as restrictive and parameter-heavy as a full-blown physical simulation, this allows to creatively model shapes with improved realism and directly use them in fabrication.