Christoph Schinko

OFFICE

Room D.3.12b     Lageplan

Institut für ComputerGraphik und WissensVisualisierung
Inffeldgasse 16c
A-8010 Graz, Austria

Phone: +43 (316) 873 - 5416

Email: c.schinkocgv.tugraz.at

Scripting languages are easy to use and very popular in various contexts. Their simplicity reduces a user’s threshold of inhibitions to start programming – especially, if the user is not a computer science expert. As a consequence, our generative modeling framework Euclides for non-expert users is based on a JavaScript dialect. It consists of a JavaScript compiler including a front-end (lexer, parser, etc.) and backends for several platforms. In order to reduce our users’ development times and for fast feedback, we integrated an interactive interpreter based on the already existing compiler. Instead of writing large proportions of new code, whose behavior has to be consistent with the already existing compiler, we used a minimally invasive solution, which allows us to reuse most parts of the compiler’s front- and back-end.

We present a use case that demonstrates the effectiveness of procedural shape modeling for mass customization of consumer products. We show a metadesign that is composed of a few well-defined procedural shape building blocks. It can generate a large variety of shapes and covers most of a design space defined by a collection of exemplars, in our case wedding rings. We describe the process of model abstraction for the shape space spanned by these shapes, arguing that the same is possible for other shape design spaces as well.