Abstract

We present the first computational approach that can transform 3D meshes, created by traditional modeling programs, directly into instructions for a computer-controlled knitting machine. Knitting machines are able to robustly and repeatably form knitted 3D surfaces from yarn, but have many constraints on what they can fabricate. Given user-defined starting and ending points on an input mesh, our system incrementally builds a helix-free, quad-dominant mesh with uniform edge lengths, runs a tracing procedure over this mesh to generate a knitting path, and schedules the knitting instructions for this path in a way that is compatible with machine constraints. We demonstrate our approach on a wide range of 3D meshes.

Files

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Citation

Vidya Narayanan, Lea Albaugh, Jessica Hodgins, Stelian Coros, and James McCann. 2018. Automatic Machine Knitting of 3D Meshes. ACM Trans. Graph. 37, 3, Article 35 (August 2018), 15 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3186265