Parameterized Freeform Shape Design and Deformation

Deformation is the most widely used in product design. Interactive free-form deformation (FFD), however, is often difficult to generate a desired result by designers. And it can not explicitly specify the degree of deformations such as angle of bend. Therefore, in order to solve these problems, a parametric deformation method driven by nature product definition parameters is presented in the paper. It consists of two phases. Firstly, based on mesh segmentation using feature point and core extraction, the proposed method extracts some product definition parameters automatically. Secondly, regarding these parameters as hard constraints, the deformation process is stably and precisely performed by the constraint optimization. Comparing to previous FFD methods, the proposed method has several distinctive benefits: designers can get the expected deformation efficiently, and then form the product family easily. Finally, shoe industry application of the method in product design is demonstrated. The dimension and style of shoe-last can be changed rapidly to achieve new product design by editing parameters.