A Compiler for 3D Machine Knitting
We present a compiler that can automatically turn assemblies of high-level shape primitives (tubes, sheets) into low-level machine instructions.
July 10, 2016
ACM SIGGRAPH 2016
Authors
James McCann (Disney Research)
Lea Albaugh (Disney Research)
Vidya Narayanan (Disney Research)
April Grow (Disney Research/UC Santa Cruz)
Wojciech Matusik (Massacusetts Institute of Technology)
Jen Mankoff (Carnegie Mellon University)
Jessica Hodgins (Disney Research)
A Compiler for 3D Machine Knitting
Industrial knitting machines can produce finely detailed, seamless, 3D surfaces quickly and without human intervention. However, the tools used to program them require detailed manipulation and understanding of low-level knitting operations. We present a compiler that can automatically turn assemblies of high-level shape primitives (tubes, sheets) into low-level machine instructions. These high-level shape primitives allow knit objects to be scheduled, scaled, and otherwise shaped in ways that require thousands of edits to low-level instructions. At the core of our compiler is a transfer planning algorithm for knit cycles, which — though heuristic — we prove to be both sound and complete. This algorithm enables the translation of high-level shaping and scheduling operations into needle-level operations. We show a wide range of examples produced with our compiler and demonstrate a basic visual design interface that uses our compiler as a backend.
