Interactive Design Space Exploration and Optimization for CAD Models

ACM Transactions on Graphics 36(4), July 2017 (to be presented at SIGGRAPH 2017).

  Adriana Schulz     Jie Xu     Bo Zhu     Changxi Zheng     Eitan Grinspun     Wojciech Matusik  

 

Local-Continous Interpolation Algorithm and Code

The main technical contribution of our work is a novel interpolation algorithm on adaptive grids that allows for approximations that are both contious(smooth) and local. The proposed method is a generic interpolation scheme that can be applied independently of the dimensionality of the domain and can be combined with different types of basis functions (e.g. linear and cubic B-splines).

We have released the code for this algorithm. Please try it out and let us know if you find new exciting applications for it!

Abstract

Computer Aided Design (CAD) is a multi-billion dollar industry used by almost every mechanical engineer in the world to create practically every existing manufactured shape. CAD models are not only widely available but also extremely useful in the growing field of fabrication-oriented design because they are parametric by construction and capture the engineer’s design intent, including manufacturability. Harnessing this data, however, is challenging, because generating the geometry for a given parameter value requires time-consuming computations. Furthermore, the resulting meshes have different combinatorics, making the mesh data inherently dis- continuous with respect to parameter adjustments. In our work, we address these challenges and develop tools that allow interactive exploration and optimization of parametric CAD data. To achieve interactive rates, we use precomputation on an adaptively sampled grid and propose a novel scheme for interpolating in this domain where each sample is a mesh with different combinatorics. Specifically, we extract partial correspondences from CAD representations for local mesh morphing and propose a novel interpolation method for adaptive grids that is both continuous/smooth and local (i.e., the influence of each sample is constrained to the local regions where mesh morphing can be computed). We show examples of how our method can be used to interactively visualize and optimize objects with a variety of physical properties.



Paper

paper suplemental material

Talk Slides

pptx pdf

Source Code

We welcome researchers to use our code under this academic license agreement and we will be happy to assist with any further questions.
code + instructions

Interpolation Algorithm Code

We also have an indepent release of the interpolation algorithm. Please try it out and let us know if you find new exciting applications for it!
code + instructions

Citation

Adriana Schulz, Jie Xu, Bo Zhu, Changxi Zheng, Eitan Grinspun, and Wojciech Matusik
Interactive Design Space Exploration and Optimization for CAD Models
ACM Transactions on Graphics 36(4)

@article{Schulz:2017,
      author = {Schulz, Adriana and Xu, Jie and Zhu, Bo and Zheng, Changxi
                  and Grinspun, Eitan and Matusik, Wojciech},
      title = {Interactive Design Space Exploration and Optimization for CAD Models},
      journal = {ACM Transactions on Graphics},
      year = {July 2017},
      volume = {36},
      number = {4},
}