A compiler for 3D machine knitting
James McCann | Lea Albaugh | Vidya Narayanan | April Grow | Wojciech Matusik | Jennifer Mankoff | Jessica Hodgins |
ACM Transactions on Graphics (July 2016)
![teaser](http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/A-Compiler-for-3D-Machine-Knitting.jpg)
Industrial knitting machines can produce finely detailed, seamless, 3D surfaces quickly and without human intervention. However, the tools used to program them require detailed manipulation and understanding of low-level knitting operations. We present a compiler that can automatically turn assemblies of high-level shape primitives (tubes, sheets) into low-level machine instructions. These high-level shape primitives allow knit objects to be scheduled, scaled, and otherwise shaped in ways that require thousands of edits to low-level instructions. At the core of our compiler is a heuristic transfer planning algorithm for knit cycles, which we prove is both sound and complete. This algorithm enables the translation of high-level shaping and scheduling operations into needle-level operations. We show a wide range of examples produced with our compiler and demonstrate a basic visual design interface that uses our compiler as a backend.
James McCann, Lea Albaugh, Vidya Narayanan, April Grow, Wojciech Matusik, Jennifer Mankoff, Jessica Hodgins (July 2016). A compiler for 3D machine knitting. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 35(4).
@article{Hodgins:2017:DOE,
author={James McCann, Lea Albaugh, Vidya Narayanan, April Grow, Wojciech Matusik, Jennifer Mankoff, Jessica Hodgins},
title={A compiler for 3D machine knitting},
journal={ACM Transactions on Graphics},
volume={35},
number={4},
year={July 2016},