Interactive design space exploration and optimization for CAD models

Abstract

Computer Aided Design (CAD) is a multi-billion dollar industry used by almost every mechanical engineer in the world to create practically every existing manufactured shape. CAD models are not only widely available but also extremely useful in the growing field of fabrication-oriented design because they are parametric by construction and capture the engineer's design intent, including manufacturability. Harnessing this data, however, is challenging, because generating the geometry for a given parameter value requires time-consuming computations. Furthermore, the resulting meshes have different combinatorics, making the mesh data inherently discontinuous with respect to parameter adjustments. In our work, we address these challenges and develop tools that allow interactive exploration and optimization of parametric CAD data. To achieve interactive rates, we use precomputation on an adaptively sampled grid and propose a novel scheme for interpolating in this domain where each sample is a mesh with different combinatorics. Specifically, we extract partial correspondences from CAD representations for local mesh morphing and propose a novel interpolation method for adaptive grids that is both continuous/smooth and local (i.e., the influence of each sample is constrained to the local regions where mesh morphing can be computed). We show examples of how our method can be used to interactively visualize and optimize objects with a variety of physical properties.