Guided Exploration of Physically Valid Shapes for Furniture Design
The design of furniture consists of two major components: geometric modeling and physical validity of shapes. While advances in software for 3D modeling have made it easier for even inexperienced users to design shapes and thus make content creation easy, there is a disconnect between the geometric design and the physical functionality assessment. The typical workflow for a designer is to create a 3D model followed by validation using a physical simulator, and depending on the validation results, the designer re-iterates the whole process. This is tantamount to trial-and-error, making it a slow process, not to mention (a) the lack of any feedback to the designer specific to why the design failed and (b) the inherent limited exploration of novel shapes by encouraging designers to opt for standard geometric shapes only. While there have been previous work on suggestive modeling and interactive shape exploration, these works are limited in their feedback such as providing only a binary response about whether the design is valid or not, lack of informed exploration, etc. This paper proposes “a computational design framework for efficient and intuitive exploration” of physically valid furniture design shapes. In particular, the framework allows constrained modeling of nail-jointed furniture design of furniture using medium density fiberboard, and is constrained on 3 conditions: connectivity, durability, and stability. The paper describes the proposed method and the theoretical justifications in explicit detail, and we provide a brief summary of the key details here. ...