Symm Sketch: Creating symmetric 3D free-form shapes from 2D sketches

This paper presents Symm Sketch—a system for creating symmetric 3D free-form shapes from 2D sketches. The reconstruction task usually separates a 3D symmetric shape into two types of shape components, that is, the self-symmetric shape component and the mutual-symmetric shape components. Each type can be created in an intuitive manner. Using a uniform symmetry plane, the user first draws 2D sketch lines for each shape component on a sketching plane. The z-depth information of the hand-drawn input sketches can be calculated using their property of mirror symmetry to generate 3D construction curves. In order to provide more freedom for controlling the local geometric features of the reconstructed free-form shapes(e.g., non-circular crosssections), our modeling system creates each shape component from four construction curves. Using one pair of symmetric curves and one pair of general curves, an improved cross-sectional surface blending scheme is applied to generate a parametric surface for each component. The final symmetric free-form shape is progressively created, and is represented by 3D triangular mesh. Experimental results illustrate that our system can generate complex symmetric free-form shapes effectively and conveniently.