Folding cartons: Interactive manipulation of cartons from 2D layouts

Cartons are broadly used in the packaging industry and in our daily life. While most traditional packages are axis-aligned cuboids, there is a recent trend of creating paper packages and cartons with more complicated geometries. In this work, we present an interactive system to manipulate 3D cartons from 2D layouts. Two key components, automatic folding and suggestive editing, make our system remarkably easy to use. The automatic folding step computes the 3D coordinates of vertexes in a 3D carton model based on a simple observation. Then, the suggestive editing step determines several geometric constraints, such as vertex merging, merging propagation, and panel pasting, so that users can flexibly manipulate 3D shapes. Moreover, our system supports automatic updating of the corresponding 2D layouts when the user constructs and edits carton shapes in 3D to correct and explore potential layouts.