Interactive Editing of Upholstered Furniture

Fast visualization of industrial parts for rapid prototyping is nowadays eased by the fact that CAD construction data is readily available in most cases. Upholstery constitutes an important exception as its shape is not given a priori but the result of complex physical interactions between hard bodies, soft cushioning and elastic sheets. In this paper we propose an interactive visualization and editing method for upholstery that infers physically plausible surfaces from a sewing pattern. Our method supports fast design decisions by allowing easy and intuitive modifications of the inferred surface at any time. We also propose a reconstruction method for point clouds that is specifically targeted at upholstery. We argue that the sewing pattern encodes important information about shape and material deformations of the final surface and consequently use it as a prior in our reconstruction algorithm. The practicability of our method is demonstrated on two real world data sets.