Density Spatial Model for Computer Aided Industrial Design

Abstract

In the early stages of industrial design, industrial designers draw many concept sketches in order to define the shape of the product. In this process, industrial designers create images of the product in order to be confirmed the objecture of the design and identify and develope the concept. We propose a new shape model called a density spatial model (DSM) to support this idea-developing phase of industrial design. Initial ideas, involving several basic shapes of the proposed product, become the foundation for developing many variations of the form of the product. Therefore, and shape model used in the early stages of industrial design must provide the ability to generate many variations for further discussion and proposal. In order to realize such a shape model, we modified the shape model traditionally used in the field of computer animation. Several shape models have been introduced for use in computer animation in order to model soft organic shapes. Such shape models include the Blobby Model by J. F. Blinn, and the Metaball by Nishimura, et al. The former models the equipotential surface (equi-energy surface) of hydrogen atoms and expresses the shapes by implicit surfaces, producing shapes using shape primitives. We modified and extended the Blobby Model to develop the DSM, which is able to model soft organic shapes and rigid geometric shapes requiring fewer shape primitives than conventional organic shape modelers. Shapes are modeled using one consistent method in the DSM.