Wire Mesh Design

Figure 1: Wire mesh design allows creating physical realizations (1st and 5th images) of a given design surface (2nd and 4th images) composed of interwoven material (middle image) in an interactive, optimization-supported design process. Both the torso and the Igea face are constructed from a single sheet of regular wire mesh. We present a computational approach for designing wire meshes, i.e., freeform surfaces composed of woven wires arranged in a regular grid. To facilitate shape exploration, we map material properties of wire meshes to the geometric model of Chebyshev nets. This abstraction is exploited to build an efficient optimization scheme. While the theory of Chebyshev nets suggests a highly constrained design space, we show that allowing controlled deviations from the underlying surface provides a rich shape space for design explo-ration. Our algorithm balances globally coupled material constraints with aesthetic and geometric design objectives that can be specified by the user in an interactive design session. In addition to sculptural art, wire meshes represent an innovative medium for industrial ap-plications including composite materials and architectural façades. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a variety of digital and physical prototypes with a level of shape complexity unobtainable using previous methods