Computational Design of Mechanical Characters

We present an interactive design system that allows non-expert users to create animated mechanical characters. Given an articulated character as input, the user iteratively creates an animation by sketching motion curves indicating how different parts of the character should move. For each motion curve, our framework creates an optimized mechanism that reproduces it as closely as possible. The resulting mechanisms are attached to the character and then connected to each other using gear trains, which are created in a semi-automated fashion. The mechanical assemblies generated with our system can be driven with a single input driver, such as a hand-operated crank or an electric motor, and they can be fabricated using rapid prototyping devices. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by designing a wide range of mechanical characters, several of which we manufactured using 3D printing. While our pipeline is designed for characters driven by planar mechanisms, significant parts of it extend directly to non-planar mechanisms, allowing us to create characters with compelling 3D motions.

我们提出了一个交互式设计系统，它允许非专业用户创建动画机械角色。给定一个关节角色作为输入，用户通过绘制运动曲线来迭代创建动画，这些曲线表明角色的不同部分应该如何移动。对于每条运动曲线，我们的框架都会创建一个优化的机构，使其尽可能精确地重现该曲线。生成的机构被附着到角色上，然后使用齿轮系相互连接，齿轮系是以半自动的方式创建的。用我们的系统生成的机械组件可以由单个输入驱动器驱动，比如手动曲柄或电动马达，并且它们可以使用快速成型设备制造。我们通过设计各种各样的机械角色展示了我们方法的通用性，其中一些我们使用3D打印制造。虽然我们的流程是为平面机构驱动的角色设计的，但其中很大一部分可直接扩展到非平面机构，使我们能够创建具有引人注目的3D运动的角色。