Sketch2Stress: Sketching with Structural Stress Awareness
This addresses a gap for designers in digital fabrication by making structural analysis visible during sketching, though it is an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The authors tackled the problem of structural analysis being inaccessible during early sketching in product design by introducing Sketch2Stress, which predicts stress maps from 2D sketches and user-assigned forces, enabling designers to identify problematic regions with demonstrated effectiveness in experiments and user studies.
In the process of product design and digital fabrication, the structural analysis of a designed prototype is a fundamental and essential step. However, such a step is usually invisible or inaccessible to designers at the early sketching phase. This limits the user's ability to consider a shape's physical properties and structural soundness. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel approach Sketch2Stress that allows users to perform structural analysis of desired objects at the sketching stage. This method takes as input a 2D freehand sketch and one or multiple locations of user-assigned external forces. With the specially-designed two-branch generative-adversarial framework, it automatically predicts a normal map and a corresponding structural stress map distributed over the user-sketched underlying object. In this way, our method empowers designers to easily examine the stress sustained everywhere and identify potential problematic regions of their sketched object. Furthermore, combined with the predicted normal map, users are able to conduct a region-wise structural analysis efficiently by aggregating the stress effects of multiple forces in the same direction. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of our system with extensive experiments and user studies.