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)
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},
