Fabricable Discretized Ruled Surfaces

Abstract

We present a method to automatically approximate a given surface with a small set of patches, each being a developable ruled surface featuring long-ruling lines. These construction primitives are attractive for their inherent ease of fabrication by cutting and folding inextensible materials and for their favourable structural properties. Our algorithm strikes a good trade-off between the simplicity of produced designs (in terms of the number and shapes of the patches) and approximation quality. To this end, it is guided by a smooth curvature-aligned cross-field. Compared to traditional methods, we rely on final discretization steps to ensure the developability of the ruled surfaces and produce a fabricable layout, bypassing the need to enforce that the strips are strictly developable in continuous settings (which requires difficulty in enforcing geometric conditions). We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm by producing several viable designs and using them to physically fabricate various physical objects.