Structure-Preserving Editing of Plates and Volumes for Laser Cutting

We present a 3D editor for laser cutting that extends the range of models that users can manipulate. Our system gives users control over the detailed elements of laser cutting, i.e., individual plates and the associated joints, yet at the same time also allows for efficient editing by means of volumetric tools while preserving the structure of plates in the model. Our system consists of four functional groups: (1) We started with a fabrication-aware 3D editor capable of handling volumetric models (kyub, Baudisch et al., 2019). This subsystem represents 3D models as a single volume. (2) We added a second subsystem that represents laser-cut models as an arrangement of plates in 3D. This allowed us to add tools that allow manipulating individual plates. (3) We unified these two subsystems by adding a demotion mechanism that breaks volumes down into multiple plates, to allow users to apply plate tools to volumes, as well as (4) a promotion mechanism, which infers volumetric substructures from sets of plates, to allow users to apply volume-based tools to plate structures. We validated the resulting system by recreating the 100-model benchmark of assembler(3) (Roumen et al., 2021a). Our combined system successfully recreated 87 of the models, compared to 9 with a volume-only baseline system (kyub) and 15 with a plate-only baseline system (flatFitFab, McCrae et al., 2014).