DEVELOPING UNDEVELOPABLE SURFACES USING PARTICLE SYSTEMS

This paper presents a new approach for calculating a development of an undevelopable surface using a particle system. An undevelopable surface is any surface that cannot be flattened into a map without stretching, tearing, or compressing itself, as for example the surface of a sphere. While geometry based algorithms for solving this problem usually introduce large distortions to the development, the technique presented here allows calculating a development with minimal distortion.The technique was developed to enable automatic calculation of 3d-models of made to measure shoes based solely on the CAD-/CAM-data used for construction and production. It is embedded into a web-based process-chain which aims at reducing the costs for manufacturing custom-sized shoes, and thus supporting traditional shoe-makers.