A Computer Aided Model for Copy-and-Paste Editing in the Industrial Design Cycle

This thesis represents work was really to do computer aided design by thinking about shapes and forms. More specifically, the goal of this work is to provide industrial designers with an intuitive mechanism for transferring brand-identity elements from one object to another, and to allow manual modifications of physical prototype details to be scanned and reincorporated back into original digital models. An algorithm to copy-and-paste freeform details from one freeform surface to an-other using displacement field and planar parameterization operators is presented. A tool based on the algorithm is developed such that, from the designer's viewpoint, details from one surface can be mapped to another in two steps: the selection of the detail to transfer (copy); and the choice of the surface onto which the detail is to be mapped (paste). A proof of concept has been implemented and is used to demon-strate the capabilities of the framework. In conjunction with this surface Copy-and-Paste the concept of example based modeling is introduced as a more intuitive approach to form design. This new concep