adidas TAPE: 3-d footwear concept design

ABSTRACT

3-D tools have been successfully established in several areas of the footwear design process. Yet, 3-D tools often find little adoption during initial concept creation for various reasons. These tools are often slow, difficult to use and limit creativity in ways unacceptable to most designers. The lack of 3-D content creation in the beginning makes it inherently difficult to implement ideal production pipelines that enrich and reuse assets during all steps of the content creation. At adidas, we have successfully established a simple, sketch based 3-D tool which feeds into our 3D design pipeline and finds astonishing acceptance within the design community. Our team presented a digital 3-D footwear design process and pipeline at Siggraph 2017 [Suessmuth et al. 2017]. Tape, the first tool in this pipeline, allows our designers to create meaningful 3-D assets in the early stages of design. In this talk, we explain the origin of Tape and walk the audience through all key features, their purpose in terms of footwear design and their implementation.

References

1. Edwin Catmull and Raphael Rom. 1974. A Class of Local Interpolating Splines. In Computer Aided Geometric Design, Robert E. Barnhill and Richard F. Riesenfeld (Eds.). Academic Press, 317 -- 326.
2. Daniele Panozzo, Ilya Baran, Olga Diamanti, and Olga Sorkine-Hornung. 2013. Weighted Averages on Surfaces. ACM Transactions on Graphics (proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH) 32, 4 (2013), 60:1--60:12.
3. Jochen Suessmuth, Sky Asay, Conor Fitzgerald, Mario Poerner, Davoud Ohadi, and Detlef Mueller. 2017. Concept Through Creation: Establishing a 3-D Design Process in the Footwear Industry. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Talks. 50:1--50:2.
4. Michael Zollhoefer, Ezgi Sert, Guenther Greiner, and Jochen Suessmuth. 2012. GPU based ARAP Deformation using Volumetric Lattices. In Eurographics 2012 - Short Papers. The Eurographics Association.

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Computer graphics

    • Rendering

    • Shape modeling

• Theory of computation

  • Randomness, geometry and discrete structures

    • Computational geometry