Calculation method of hosiery knitting parameters based on three-dimensional mesh sampling

Abstract

Custom socks, such as medical compression socks and hiking socks, are precisely designed and knitted according to the user's foot shape. However, developing styles of custom socks with commercial computer-aided design software requires workers to manually calculate the knitting parameters, and repeatedly adjust the knitting parameters through sample-making to meet the design requirements. We present a method to optimize the manual calculation and adjustment process of knitting parameters by using graphics technology. Our method converts a sock mesh model created by conventional modeling software into knitting parameters. Hosiery machines are able to knit socks with the same dimensions as the mesh based on the output parameters. Specifically, given user-defined top and toe markers on an input mesh, our system runs a sampling procedure over this mesh to gradually generate a knitting path that contains shape and dimension features of the mesh, and transforms the knitting path into knitting parameters for machine knitting. We demonstrated the feasibility of our method by knitting on a computerized hosiery machine. Filling the knitted socks with a soft foam model, we found that the knitted socks fit roughly well with the mesh surface, and the dimensional gap between the input mesh and the knitted socks (relaxed state) in several positions was below 4.90%.