Karthik Gopalan, Rachel Lee, James Lin
Vacuum forming is a popular manufacturing technique which conforms a 2D plastic sheet to a 3D mold. However, vacuum forming plastic with 2D texture faces a same challenge found in texture mapping: when applying a texture an arbitrary 3D surface, its scale, shape, and angle is not preserved. To address this, we simulate vacuum forming the 2D texture using a mass-springs cloth simulation with gravity and vacuum forces, then create a conformal map via global parameterization of the mesh to pre-distort the texture. This solution enables applications such as creating undistorted MRI coils closely conforming to any 3D scanned head shape or thermoforming other plastic objects such as figurines or models.
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