Tabby: Explorable Design for 3D Printing Textures
This addresses the challenge of creating customizable textures for 3D printing, particularly for designers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing interactive design tools.
The paper tackled the problem of designing 3D printing textures by introducing Tabby, an interactive tool that allows users to sketch textures in 2D and generate them onto curved surfaces, with a user study showing it effectively supports design exploration for both novice and experienced users.
This paper presents Tabby, an interactive and explorable design tool for 3D printing textures. Tabby allows texture design with direct manipulation in the following workflow: 1) select a target surface, 2) sketch and manipulate a texture with 2D drawings, and then 3) generate 3D printing textures onto an arbitrary curved surface. To enable efficient texture creation, Tabby leverages an auto-completion approach which automates the tedious, repetitive process of applying texture, while allowing flexible customization. Our user evaluation study with seven participants confirms that Tabby can effectively support the design exploration of different patterns for both novice and experienced users.