A Suggestive System For Folding Carton Design

Folding cartons have been widely used in the packaging industry in recent years.The popularity of cartons has increased,not to mention the fact that they are environ-mental friendly due to their recyclability and degradability.Cartons are usually de-signed based on experience and trial-and-error.Designers typically start a package de-sign by generating a 2D vector artwork;then,a 3D mockup is essential for designers and clients to see the real appearance.There are two ways to create a 3D mockup.A digital mockup is a great,inexpensive way of showing how the design would appear in real life,plus it allows designers to repeatedly modify the layout.There have been many commercial software packages developed to help designers improve their design efficiency and productivity.However,the existing softwares still require extensive manual work to design cartons.Therefore,to solve the problem of efficiently construting 3D models from 2D layouts,this thesis focuses on constructing the topology of 3D carton models based on intelligent manipulation.A suggestive sys-tem is developed based on constrained geometry optimization.The proposed system is efficient for constructing 3D carton models,and exploring the varity of 2D layouts.Specifically,the main work and contributions are listed as following:1.Shape constraint construction of carton models and shape optimizationIn order to build a feasible 3D carton state during the folding process,a set of ge-ometric shape constraints are construted,including shape rigidity constraints and shape modification constraints.Shape rigidity constraints are used to describe the property of rigid cartons.To intuitively descripe a desired state,we propose shape modification constraints.A constrained shape optimization problem is then solved given certain con-straints to construct the decided model of folding cartons.Moreover,we can enforce these shape constraints into 2D layouts to explore various layouts,and correct design errors of imprecise layouts.2.A suggestive system for efficient carton designIn order to construct 3D models from a 2D layout with user interactions and ma-nipulate the current model to explore and correct layouts,in this thesis,a suggestive system is developed based on shape optimization.Three types of suggestive operations are provided to users:vertex merging,merging propagation and panel pasting.Users can effectively construct 3D carton models after confirming these suggestive interac-tions,which are automatically detected by our system.Users can also edit the current carton model by dragging edges to explore various layouts.A user-study is conducted to evalute the productivity of the proposed system for constructing digital 3D mockups from 2D layouts and to analyze its effectiveness in guiding non-expert users to fabricate physical mockups from 2D layouts.