Reading #22: Plushie: An Interactive Design System for Plush Toys

COMMENTS ON OTHERS:

            Hong-Hoe (Ayden) Kim

SUMMARY

            Plushie, is an interactive system that allows nonprofessional users to design their own original plush toys. To design a plush toy, one needs to construct an appropriate two-dimensional (2D) pattern. However, it is difficult for non-professional users to appropriately design a 2D pattern. Plushie, allows the user to create a 3D plush toy model from scratch by simply drawing its desired silhouette. The user can also edit the model, such as by cutting the model and adding a part, using simple sketching interface. The resulting model is always associated with a 2D pattern and the 3D model is the result of a physical simulation that mimics the inflation effect caused by stuffing.

The user interactively draws free-form strokes on the canvas as gestures and the system performs corresponding operations. The system also provides some special editing operations tailored for plush toy design including create, cut, create parts, pull, insert and delete.  The authors used a standard triangle mesh for the representation of 3D model and the 2D patches with relatively coarse mesh (1000-2000 vertices) to achieve interactive performance. Each vertex, edge, and face of the 3D mesh is associated with corresponding entities in the 2D mesh. A 3D mesh is always given as a result of applying a physical simulation to the assembled 2D pattern. To be more precise, the physical simulation applied to the 3D mesh is governed by the rest length of each edge, which is defined in the 2D mesh geometry.  

DISCUSSION

            Creating 3D models is often a hard and laborious task due to the complexity and diversity of shapes involved, the intricate relationships between them, and the variety of surface representations. Current high-end modeling systems such as Maya, AutoCAD, and CATIA incorporate powerful tools for accurate and detailed geometric model construction and manipulation. These systems typically employ the WIMP (Window, Icon, Menu, Pointer) interface paradigm, which are based on selecting operations from menus and floating palettes, entering parameters in dialog boxes, and moving control points.

In this case, sketched input is used to define an initial state of a complex physical simulation or procedural model, domains that are typically encumbered with many parameters and initial settings to define. Mori and Igarashi provide an intriguing example of how SBIM techniques could be integrated with physical simulation: “if one can run an aerodynamic simulation during the interactive design of an airplane model, it might be helpful to intelligently adjust the entire geometry in response to the user’s simple deformation operations so that it can actually fly.” Exploring the output space of a procedural or physical model can be much more natural and efficient with free-form gestures, a notion that needs to be explored more fully in the future.