Combining Free Form Shapes and Geometric Primitives for effective Shape Manipulation

CAD modeling typically involves the use of simple geometric primitives whereas recent advances in deep-learning based 3D surface modeling have opened new shape design avenues. Unfortunately, these advances have not yet been accepted by the CAD community because they cannot be integrated into engineering workflows.

To remedy this, we have developed in collaboration with NeuralConcept a novel approach to effectively combining geometric primitives and free-form surfaces represented by implicit surfaces for accurate modeling. Our key contribution is a novel SDF-based model that effectively combines the different kinds of primitives that are used in CAD to produce interpretable models that retain their internal consistency when modified and are made of parts that can actually be built. This opens up new ways to perform 3D shape manipulation and optimization in a user-friendly manner, as shown in the figure above. ?

For more details see our ArXiv technical report.