CESCG 2015 - Preliminary Program

3D printing is considered a disruptive technology with potentially tremendous socioeconomic impact. In recent years, additive manufacturing technologies have made significant progress in terms of both sophistication and price; they have advanced to a point where devices now feature high-resolution, full-color, and multi-material printing. Nonetheless, they remain of limited use, given the lack of efficient algorithms and intuitive tools that can be used to design and model 3D-printable content. My vision is to unleash the full potential of 3D printing technology with the help of computational methods. In our research, we are working to invent and develop new computational techniques for intuitively designing virtual 3D models and bringing them to the real world. Given the digital nature of the process, three factors play a central role: computational models and efficient representations that facilitate intuitive design, accurate and fast simulation techniques, and intuitive authoring tools for physically realizable objects and materials. In this talk, I will present several projects that demonstrate our recent efforts in working toward this goal, structured according to basic object properties, and the lessons learned from working over several years with various 3D printers.

Bibliographical Details

Bernd Bickel joined IST Austria in early 2015 as Assistant Professor. He is a computer scientist interested in computer graphics and its overlap into animation, biomechanics, material science, and digital fabrication. His main objective is to push the boundaries of how digital content can be efficiently created, simulated, and reproduced.

Bernd obtained his Master’s degree in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2006. For his PhD studies, Bernd joined the group of Markus Gross who is a full professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and the director of Disney Research Zurich. From 2011-2012, Bernd was a visiting professor at TU Berlin, and in 2012 he became a research scientist and research group leader at Disney Research, where he investigates approaches for simulating, designing, and fabricating materials and 3D objects.

Bernd’s work focuses on two closely related challenges: (1) developing novel modeling and simulation methods, and (2) investigating efficient representation and editing algorithms for materials and functional objects. Recent work includes: theoretical foundations and practical algorithms for measuring and modeling the deformation behavior of soft tissue; simulating and reproducing fundamental properties, such as elasticity, surface reflectance, and subsurface scattering; and computational design systems for efficiently creating functional artifacts such as deformable objects and mechanical systems.

Digital Shape Reconstruction is a rapidly expanding new technology to produce complex digital models from measured data. A wide variety of applications emerges in mechanical engineering, medical sciences, and preserving the cultural heritage of mankind.

This talk focuses on reproducing engineering objects and investigates the limits of creating perfect CAD models in a semi-automatic manner. It gives an overview of the whole DSR process from 3D data acquisition through algorithms to reproduce the original design intent to 3D printing. Intermediate geometric processing steps include merging point clouds, repairing and simplifying meshes, segmentation, classifying surface regions, fitting surfaces and perfecting the final models before these are exported into CAD/CAM systems. Some interesting algorithmic details will also be discussed. The talk will be supplemented with lots of short videos that will help to gain some practical insight into this highly complex, interdisciplinary area.

Bibliographical Details

Dr. Tamas Varady led the Geometric Modeling Laboratory at the Computer and Automation Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for 20 years (1984 - 2003). He acted as Chief Technology Advisor for Geomagic, Inc., USA, and partly directed the development of their flagship product, Geomagic Studio (2003 - 2010). Currently he is a full professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics; his research interest includes digital shape reconstruction and surface modeling based on general topology curve networks. Dr. Varady has published more than 90 research papers, and his work is highly cited (2500+). He is an associate editor of Computer-Aided Geometric Design (Elsevier).