Design with Nonlinear Constraints

  • Chengcheng Tang

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

Most modern industrial and architectural designs need to satisfy the requirements of their targeted performance and respect the limitations of available fabrication technologies. At the same time, they should reflect the artistic considerations and personal taste of the designers, which cannot be simply formulated as optimization goals with single best solutions. This thesis aims at a general, flexible yet e cient computational framework for interactive creation, exploration and discovery of serviceable, constructible, and stylish designs. By formulating nonlinear engineering considerations as linear or quadratic expressions by introducing auxiliary variables, the constrained space could be e ciently accessed by the proposed algorithm Guided Projection, with the guidance of aesthetic formulations. The approach is introduced through applications in different scenarios, its effectiveness is demonstrated by examples that were difficult or even impossible to be computationally designed before. The first application is the design of meshes under both geometric and static constraints, including self-supporting polyhedral meshes that are not height fields. Then, with a formulation bridging mesh based and spline based representations, the application is extended to developable surfaces including origami with curved creases. Finally, general approaches to extend hard constraints and soft energies are discussed, followed by a concluding remark outlooking possible future studies.
Date of AwardDec 10 2015
Original languageEnglish (US)
Awarding Institution
  • Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering
SupervisorHelmut Pottmann (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Computational design
  • applied geometry
  • Computer aided design
  • Computer Graphics
  • guided projection
  • nonlinear constraints

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